I guess that now that the transcript is released and I have read it, I can join the whistle-blower list too.
This story doesn't make Trump seem innocent
The State Department blocked a top U.S. diplomat from giving a scheduled deposition Tuesday before a House panel conducting the
impeachment inquiry into President
Donald Trump.
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, is a witness to Trumpās efforts to persuade
Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race.
Trump tweeted that heād āloveā to have Sondland, a former hotel executive who donated $1 million to Trumpās inaugural committee in 2017, testify Tuesday if not for āa totally compromised kangaroo court.ā
efforts by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to block testimony and withhold documents is āevidence of obstruction.ā
Sondland had ādeeply relevantā text messages on a personal device that he provided to the State Department, which then refused to hand them over to Congress.
In his diplomatic role, Sondland helped Ukraine ānavigateā Trumpās demands for investigations into Biden and a debunked conspiracy theory regarding the 2016 cyberattack against the Democratic National Committee, according to a whistleblower complaint filed in August by a U.S. intelligence official.
That complaint, which accuses Trump of seeking foreign assistance in helping his reelection campaign and possibly using military aid to Ukraine as leverage, has become the center of an impeachment inquiry into the president launched by the House last month.
Trump has defended his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to investigate Biden, claiming the conversation was āperfectā and denying that he used American aid as āquid pro quo.ā
Kurt Volker, the State Department special envoy to Ukraine until his resignation last month, told members of Congress last week that he was unaware of Trumpās efforts to urge Ukraine to look into Biden. But text messages between himself, Sondland and Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine, raise questions about his story.
In the series of texts Volker provided to Congress, Taylor wrote to Sondland in July that Zelensky is āsensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics.ā
Sondland responded: āAbsolutely, but we need to get the conversation started and the relationship built, irrespective of the pretext. I am worried about the alternative.ā
Later in July, Volker texted a top aide to Zelensky that the White House would work to ānail down the date for [a] visit to Washington,ā but only on the assumption that āPresident Z convinces trump he will investigate/āget to the bottom of what happenedā in 2016.ā
IMPEACHED! It's a foregone conclusion. The question is, will the Senate not impeach Trump for such impeachable offenses? Then this is good. The American people need to see the GOP is protecting a criminal president. And if voters are ok with all that, then they can re elect trump and the Republicans who protected him for 4 years.
The democrats need to stop worrying that impeaching Trump will hurt them in 2020. It won't.