Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Reading the 378-page Sondland transcript on my phone.

Notes and observations to follow.

Mute this post if you don’t want to be pestered with the evolving thread.

Bear with me. Gonna take a while.

1/?

First nugget:

The White House tried to get Sondland to come in for an “interview” to preview his testimony (and likely align stories) before his deposition.

Sondland declined.

2/

Sondland called Rick Perry to get their stories straight on the July 10th meeting which Fiona Hill and others testified was abruptly severed when Sondland brought up the de facto Ukraine quid pro quo...

3/

An interview with Perry then appeared in the WSJ which just so happened to be “harmonized” with Sondland’s version... quite honestly claims Sondy.

Mm-hmm. I call fellow witnesses multiple times before we deliver the same narrative all the time, said no one.

4/

Pompeo’s State Department tried to keep Sondland from testifying but he - for reasons of self-preservation probably - wanted to “get [his] story out” before being forced to testify involuntarily.

Sondy was looking out for himself at least somewhat.

Sondy wasn’t all in.

5/

Sondland basically describes Perry like a buddy; freely acknowledges talking to him multiple times about their recollections of key meetings; but claims to not recall if they talked about his upcoming testimony.

🙄

Sondland is remarkably bad at feigning ignorance.

In his prepared statement, Sondland claimed he didn’t have any idea what political machinations were behind Rudy’s efforts - yet, he testified he had been following Rudy’s comments in the media for years... which were all about Biden, the DNC, etc.

Another blow to his story.

Then Sondland gives Ukraine the low-level coffee boy treatment and directly contradicts his prepared statement.

Opening statement: Ukraine was a central part of my role.

An hour later: Ukraine? T’was but a trifle to me...

Schiff, et al, then ran circles around Sondland for both suggesting he had followed press reports about Rudy for years yet someone was entirely in the dark about what Rudy was up to.

Guys, I think Sondy is half-telling the truth here. He seems like a dippy dilettante.

Here’s where Sondland tries to massage and nuance events to diminish his culpability.

His opening statement claimed he didn’t know what Rudy was up to until later and was just unwittingly helping him... but then gets amnesia about what he knew when.

He claims he was just the errand boy chasing down the quo without any idea it was attached to the quid or bad in any way...

...and claims he would have never *checks notes* actively worked to produce what the president asked for... if he had known why he wanted it.

Sure, pal.

And as he did in his prepared statement, Sondland insists that Rudy - speaking on behalf of Trump - specifically pushed for two political asks: investigations into the DNC and Biden’s son’s company, Burisma...

...which Sondland swears he didn’t appraise as political.

🙄

Okay, now we’re about 100 pages in and Democrats’ counsel has used up their first block time.

Republican counsel takes over.

This should be interesting because it will reveal their strategy to protect Trump and discredit negative testimony.

I’ll spare you the lead up but Repub counsel goes through a fairly protracted series of questions aiming to establish that Ukraine is corrupt and corruption is bad and it’s quite good of a president to not like such things...

...this doesn’t go where they wanted though.

After all that setup, counsel asks specific companies Sondland knew were of concern.

He names two. Burisma and Naftogaz.

That would seem to bolster the claim it was about *corruption* in general not Hunter Biden’s one company...

Unbeknownst to counsel and subsequent to this testimony, it was discovered and reported that the interest in Naftogaz was tied to an alleged scheme by Giuliani’s now indicted pals to make some serious corn off of toppling the straight shooters at Naftogaz.

Oops.

Counsel then falls all over himself a bit to try to cut off Sondland from talking freely about the subject of Trump withholding aid and Ambassador Taylor’s incriminating text about it.

Not a good look when counsel tries to stymie a response to relevant questions.

Sondland goes on to describe a direct call to Trump where he bluntly asked what Trump wanted - and Trump, like all mobsters do - reiterated the quid pro quo without stating it.

“Do the right thing.” meant “Give me what I want: investigations into my adversaries.”

Okay, now we have a random aside, but it’s a funny one.

Dumb as a stump Devin Nunes gets a chance to ask questions and immediately leads in with a moronic assertion about the Steele dossier.

Schiff calls bullshit and points out that what Nunes calls facts ain’t facts.

Mark Meadows, partisan buffoon that he is, gets all Maddy McSad about Schiff running a tight ship.

Schiff responds with a biting cut down.

“When you’re chairing a committee, if that day ever comes...”

Hahahha. Hhahahahahaahaha.

I’ll spare you the stupidity of Jim Jordan’s questions.

At this point in the proceedings, the deposition was adjourned for lunch...

...and while out on break, Slick Mick Mulvaney vomited up a full confession at his nutbag press conference.

Annnd, we’re back to Sondland now.

This is kinda interesting, Sondland repeatedly testified that Trump hated Ukraine and was prone to ranting about how they had “tried to take [him] down” in 2016.

Per Sondland, it wasn’t so much that Trump wanted a quid pro quo... Trump wanted to ice Ukraine entirely...

Sondland basically suggested that it wasn’t so much that Trump wanted something in return for keeping up relations.

Trump wanted to cut them off; and the investigations were a chance for them to buy their way out of his doghouse.

Slight difference there. Same crime.

Alright, I’m less than halfway through this monster doc.

Gotta take a break and pick it up a bit later...

Stay tuned for a Part II.

Okay, while I wait in line at CVS, let me reprise the not small, narrative changing implication of Sondland’s early testimony:

Trump thought Ukraine sucked and wanted to screw them. Rudy’s position was “Yes, they do... but if they help you in 2020, they won’t suck anymore.”

This was an old-fashioned pay-to-play.

Ukraine hadn’t bought Trump’s favor by supporting him previously.

He wanted to cut them off as a result.

Rudy’s scheme was to instead shake them down to keep themselves in the game.

Okay, I’m back at it (though, admittedly, reading a bit quicker since the afternoons always rehash so much of the same material).

We open with Repub counsel steering Sondland into a weird admission:

Ukraine merely announcing investigations might have been enough...

Per Sondland, he thought even getting Ukraine to announce the investigation on TV (rather than actually conducting them) would maybe fulfill the ask.

R’s counsel seems to have been trying to establish the quo in the quid pro quo was less serious than it might seem...

...but if you adopt that position, you are stipulating that Trump’s desired outcome was entirely political:

Public statements politically beneficial to his campaign.

That is, in some ways, a more clear cut offense than conditioning aid on “fighting corruption”.

Sondland then gets backed into a rather implausible claim that he learned of the withholding of aid in mid-July but somehow remained in the dark about the reasoning for a full six weeks - and yet that never came up in his conversations with Ukraine.

Think about that.

The dude who called Ukraine foreign relations a “central part of his ambassadorship” claimed under oath that he had zero discussions with Ukraine about the withholding of military aid absolutely essential to their survival.

Didn’t come up.

LOL. Sure.

Summing the next block of testimony:

Everyone around Sondland was chattering about the withholding of aid; the push for investigation announcements; and the connection between the two but poor, gullible Sondland had nary a clue strange things were afoot at the Circle K.

His utterly unbelievable claims pretty much read like:

“I was indeed inside the meth lab and it smelled weird and there was so much cash everywhere but every time I asked what was going on, people just brushed past me with little glassine envelopes. I was stumped!”

Meanwhile, in one of the myriad episodes throughout his testimony of having amnesia until being confronted with his own text messages, Sondland is reminded of a call he had with Ukraine President Zelensky prepping him to deliver what Trump wanted from him...

So, Sondland was both blissfully in the dark about the politics afoot but simultaneously so knowledgeable about them, he briefed the President of Ukraine on what the political asks were.

Sondland is a terrible liar. Terrible. I mean, terrible.

And contrary to his asinine insistence he was a clueless babe in the woods sleepwalking through corruption in the light of day, he was also made directly aware Ukraine knew they were being used to help Trump’s election and weren’t psyched about that.

Sondland then slips and acknowledges “we” were prepping Ukraine President Zelensky on what Trump wanted before hastily catching his error and claiming “someone” was prepping him.

10 hours is a long time to maintain lies. Sondland did badly at it.

Sondland then testifies that the internal read-outs from the infamous “perfect call” were falsified to misrepresent what occurred - which he only learned when the WH released its call memo.

Translation: there was an internal coverup. I wasn’t in on it.

Okay, I’m 3/4 of the way through the transcript and am sure there are other minor nuggets in the last 75 pages but I’m gonna cap it here.

300 pages on a phone is more than lethal to one’s soul.

Let me just sum it up with some impressions...

1) Sondland is what you would expect of a rich dude who bought a foreign affairs role in a corrupt org.:

- not the smartest
- kinda shady
- utterly over his head
- entirely clueless about that

He’s an amateur cosplaying among very serious pros. It’s embarrassing.

2) His testimony was perjured throughout whenever the subject turned to his personal knowledge and involvement.

Some was the soft perjury of “I don’t recall.”

Some was asinine, blatant lies about his actual actions.

He did not help himself one bit.

3) Everyone even remotely connected to Ukrainian diplomacy knew fully well *at some point* that the only obstacle to unlocking aid for an ally was Trump’s feelings about whether they were helping or hurting him personally.

And lastly:

4) This went on for so long and so openly, it is documented far more richly and thoroughly than even Watergate was...

The Nixon tapes were a snapshot.

This affair left behind a massive web of calls, messages, records, and recollections.

There is a very good reason Republicans are struggling to find a footing to defend Trump:

There is just too much.

Too much evidence. Too many witnesses. Too much detail.

And it all fits together into a perfect mosaic of a corrupt conspiracy led by idiots.

It’s startling.

//