Since The Hot Screen dove deep into the tale of Portland boutique hotel maven turned Trump co-conspirator Gordon Sondland a few days ago, the story has seen some dramatic developments. First, Democratic Representative Early Blumenauer, whose congressional district includes Portland, released a statement calling for a boycott of Provenance Hotels, the boutique hotel chain Sondland founded and of which he was CEO until he became the U.S. ambassador to the European Union last year. Sondland’s attorney quickly hit back against Blumenauer’s boycott recommendation, calling it an "irresponsible attempt to hurt a homegrown business that supports hundreds of jobs in our local economy."
Next, on Friday, came news that Sondland had reversed his position, and was now willing to testify to Congress, going against the State Department’s instructions not to appear (though he still intends not to produce any documents, in line with the State Department’s directions). Given Sondland’s central role in implementing Donald Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, this reversal does not bode well for the president. Just as the ambassador’s original decision not to testify signaled his willingness to abet the conspiracy of which he’d been a part, his reversal means he may be able to put on the public record damning evidence about the plot that’s at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. Beyond this, the fact that a man who has served the president loyally for the past year seems willing to go against him in order to save his own skin speaks to the limits of Trump’s power to intimidate or otherwise block witness testimony. In turn, this suggests a potential breaking of the dam in terms of administration officials willing to defy the president.
Then last night, The Washington Post published a preview of some of Sondland’s planned testimony, based on information from an unnamed source familiar with the ambassador’s intentions. It seems likely that this source was acting at the behest of Sondland, as it paints a picture of the ambassador as naive and even somewhat clueless as to the scope of the scheme he was so busily enacting. Yet, while self-serving, his planned testimony does not look good for the president at all.
First, Sondland intends to provide vital information around a text he sent to acting ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor that Trump’s defenders, and indeed the president himself, have been holding up as clearing the president of wrongdoing. In response to Taylor’s texting him that “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Sondland replied several hours later, “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” Sondland will testify that this reply “was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call,” and that he does not know whether the president was actually telling him the truth. This is significant because the administration has pointed to Sondland’s text as some sort of objective verification that there was no plan to withhold military aid in exchange for a smear campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden; the fact that Sondland was merely relaying the president’s own words mean this defense is now meaningless, based simply on the president’s assertion.
Perhaps equally significant is the fact that Sondland appears unwilling to simply take the president’s side. According to the Post’s source, “Sondland’s testimony will raise the possibility that Trump wasn’t truthful in his denial of a quid pro quo as well as an alternative scenario in which the president’s interest in the scheme soured at a time when his administration faced mounting scrutiny over why it was withholding about $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine and delaying a leader-level visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.” The first possibility is of course the one all current evidence says is correct; the second seems to be a distinction without a difference, since even if the president abandoned the scheme, his having pursued it is in itself impeachable. In either case, it seems that Sondland is willing to acknowledge the existence of a presidential scheme to pressure Ukraine.
But what follows in the Post account demonstrates the degree to which Sondland is attempting to tell a story that excuses his own participation even as he appears ready to provide evidence to House investigators. Sondland seems to admit the possibility of a plot to smear the Bidens, while absolving himself of knowledge of that scheme: “Sondland appears poised to say that he and other diplomats did not know that the request to mention Burisma was really an effort to impugn the reputations of Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a Burisma board member. Sondland contends that he didn’t know about the Biden connection until a whistleblower complaint and transcript surfaced in late September.” As the Post points out, though, Trump’s attorney Rudy Guiliani spoke in media appearances about Hunter Biden’s role as a board member at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
Yet, seemingly torpedoing Sondland’s assertion of obliviousness, Sondland is apparently prepared to testify that he worked at the direction of Guiliani to secure a public statement from the Ukrainian government that it would investigate corruption, including at Burisma, in exchange for an invitation for Ukrainian President Zelensky to visit the White House. Sondland’s mysterious interlocutor tells the Post that “If people find that [Sondland’s ignorance of Hunter Biden being the target] incredulous, it strikes me that the incredulity is hindsight bias. The things that seem so clear to people now didn’t seem so clear in real time.” This seems an incredibly weak defense, and more evidence that the Post’s source is working to put the best possible spin on Sondland’s role. The flimsiness of the ambassador’s position also comes out in his apparent attempt to thread the needle of appearances when the Post source relates Sondland’s understanding that “It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one.” Again, for this to be true, we have to believe that Sondland thought that all his work on the pressure campaign against Ukraine had nothing to do with smearing Joe Biden.
This sense is only reinforced by further details that minimize Sondland’s role and accentuate his discomfort; the Post is told how Sondland “describes an assignment that begins with excitement and enthusiasm and ends with concern about how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine, a country fending off Russian-backed separatists that relies heavily on the United States for economic and military support.” Yet, from everything we know, Sondland nonetheless continued to be a central figure in “how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine”; and so he clearly sees his path to exculpation running through a defense that he knew nothing about the president’s effort to pressure Ukraine to assist his re-election campaign. The Post’s source goes on to make an even more explicit pitch as to Sondland’s innocence; as the newspaper summarizes, “By Sept. 9, Sondland, however, had grown increasingly concerned, as military funding for Ukraine now appeared tied to the statement as well. The person said Sondland was never briefed about Biden being part of the issue and was not aware of it until the transcript of the phone call was released. ‘If he had known earlier, he never would have touched this.’”
Sondland’s almost comically rantic efforts to get out from under the falling impeachment anvil don’t appear limited to the EU ambassador alone. The Post suggests that some of the main conspirators, including Giuliani, Sondland, and special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, may be starting to form something of a circular firing squad that speaks to their desire to escape accountability. Sondland refers both to acting at Guiliani’s direction and having a “very limited role over the summer”; meanwhile, the Post, referencing conversations between the paper and Guiliani, indicates Guilani “described Sondland’s role as more expansive” and that “He seemed to be in charge. It just seemed like he was more decisive.” The Post also notes that “Sondland, while acknowledging a close relationship with Trump, viewed Volker as more of a presence on the Ukraine issue.
(As some have been noting, the fact that Sondland, a State Department employee, was apparently acting at the direction of Guiliani, the president’s private lawyer, is an angle meriting scrutiny by the Democrats).
This lack of honor among thieves isn’t surprising, but it’s something of a relief to anyone who wants to see Trump impeached and removed from office for offenses already evidenced by things like the summary transcript of his shake-down call with the Ukrainian president. They may have engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2020 elections, but now that they’ve been caught out, we are seeing decisive signs that the conspiracy did not cover what they’d do if they were discovered.
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Sondland seems a particularly weak link in the president’s defense. I’ve been reading some of the reporting about him out in the last week or two; the picture that emerges is of a man who hasn’t been particularly ideological (though he’s given far more money to Republicans than Democrats over the years, and is a big Ayn Rand fan, which in a just universe would have disqualified him from holding a position of public trust), who carefully built his reputation as a philanthropist in Oregon and elsewhere, and who badly wanted an ambassadorship and was willing to pay to get it, even at the risk of doing some damage to his reputation (he funneled $1 million to the Trump inauguration through limited liability companies rather than directly in his own name, which suggests he was aware of the dangers to his reputation and business).
Yet Sondland’s story is not without elements of pathos and sympathy; his parents were Jews who fled Nazi Germany and resettled in America, and he was, at least until now, an American success story. The Seattle Times quotes David Nierenberg, an Oregon investment manager involved with Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, as saying that, “Sondland ‘was not reticent’ about his pursuit of a diplomatic post, preferring a German-speaking nation, which would have meant a son of Holocaust refugees ‘would have come full circle. This is what he wanted and long sought.’”
Sondland may have been driven to become an ambassador, but nothing in his history suggests he took the role with the intention of participating in a plot to literally attack the American system of government. Yet his cancellation of a planned fundraiser for Trump in 2016 in the midst of the candidate’s attacks on the Muslim parents of a slain U.S. soldier shows that Sondland was well aware of Trump’s depravity; and by the time he took the role of EU ambassador, he had been witness, along with his fellow Americans, to the racism, corruption, and authoritarianism of the Trump administration. Even knowing this, though, he would not allow his dream to be deferred.
Another intriguing bit of information as we try to assess Sondland’s character and what role he might play in the impeachment inquiry: The LA Times dug up a 2016 interview in which Sondland speaks about some of his limited political experience, in this case helping Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski work with the George W. Bush administration. As the Times summarizes:
[Sondland] portrayed himself as a master of the quid pro quo, the practice he would later deny in his text concerning the Ukraine matter. “We would make these requests and they were done quietly. They were done with rifle precision and there was always a quid pro quo,” Sondland said in the interview. “The governor would help the president with something, and the president would help the governor with something. And it was very transactional.”
One gets an idea of Sondland as a person who wants to be in the mix, who wants to be important, suggesting he may have been a receptive vessel for carrying out plans that the president clearly held to be of the highest priority. It’s also of note that Kulongoski’s former spokeswoman disputed the role that Sondland claimed for himself, saying, “If the governor needed to speak with the president or someone in the White House, he didn’t need an outside party to facilitate it.” If Sondland exaggerated his role in order to seem important, this could provide a small clue to how he’s approaching his congressional testimony. The question, of course, is whether he wants to be important in the eyes of the president, or in the eyes of the public.
If Ambassador Sondland is willing to testify truthfully, and in doing so plays some part in ending this presidency or at least moving impeachment forward, then he will have made up for some of the shame of participating in this parody of an administration. The most important matter before us, after all, is to stop this president from doing any more harm to the country and the world. But to the extent that Sondland was aware of the corrupt plot in which he played a key part, he needs to be held accountable, by the legal system for any laws he might have broken, and, particularly if that punishment does not occur, reputationally. No charity, university, or politician should ever again accept his donations, and he should be shunned from polite society.
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Finally, to circle back to Representative Blumenauer’s call for a boycott of Sondland’s hotel chain: yesterday, Provenance Hotels itself filed a complaint against Blumenauer over his boycott recommendation. A spokeswoman says that, “We believe Congressman Blumenauer’s actions constitute a potentially serious violation of Congressional ethics as outlined in multiple sections of the House Ethics Manual by threatening an administration official over a disagreement.” The hotel also alleges that donors to Blumenauer may benefit from his calls for a boycott.
I would note that I was somewhat surprised to read of Blumenauer’s boycott statement. A boycott is completely justified, but outside of the ethics violations asserted by the hotel, it strikes me that this may be a case of the representative unnecessarily reaching beyond his powers and role as a congressmen involved with the impeachment inquiry. Rather, the impetus for a boycott would be more effective and proper coming from members of the public; the public, after all, is who would be implementing the boycott, not Blumenauer. Already, it seems that the congressman’s statement is creating an unnecessary (if minor) distraction from Sondland’s role and the best way to put pressure on him so that he ends up serving the public interest.
At the same time, the assertions by Sondland’s attorney that a boycott will hurt the employees of the hotel chain is the same old argument used by the management of any company subject to a boycott. If Gordon Sondland were truly concerned about his employees’ job prospects, then he should have thought twice before accepting a position with an administration as vile and venal as the one over which Donald Trump presides. Most Americans are obviously not millionaires like the ambassador and Trump’s other wealthy donors, and so we must make a virtue out of necessity, and choose to not spend our money in order that our collective voice be heard.