The recrudescence of Gordon Sondland into national notice, via a profile in The Washington Post last week, will probably rock few people’s worlds. Compared to some of the other cheats, grifters, white nationalists, and insurrectionists who populated the Trump administration, the former ambassador to the European Union never made it out of the minor leagues in terms of notoriety, though he had his moment in the sun during the first Trump impeachment hearings — and lord knows The Hot Screen had its fun with this living embodiment of the Peter principle.
But it would be a mistake to treat Sondland the way he wishes to be treated, as a well-meaning man who got caught up in some bad shit and tried to do his duty in unfortunate circumstances — as someone deserving reconsideration and rehabilitation in the public eye. Rather, Sondland was an important participant in former President Trump’s scheme to extort Ukraine into manufacturing information that could kneecap Joe Biden’s candidacy — a scheme that led to Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives. Not only was Sondland aware of the efforts to condition military aid to Ukraine on that foreign government concocting a false story about Joe Biden’s connection to corruption there, he was an active agent in conveying those conditions to the Ukrainian government.
According to the new Washington Post profile, Sondland’s main argument in his defense is that he was actually motivated by a desire to assist Ukraine, by making sure Ukraine did what it had to do in order to receive U.S. aid. But the idea that his attempts to aid Ukraine somehow justified his participation in a corrupt plot to blackmail an ally and defraud the American people is laughable. His part in Trump’s blackmail is the overriding fact of his role in the Trump administration, and at any rate, the plot to extort Ukraine actually delayed the aid that Sondland claims he wanted Ukraine to receive. It was a scheme he should have reported to State Department lawyers, not enabled.
As a quick path to understanding Sondland’s malign role in the Ukraine plot and its eventual exposure, it’s helpful to remember not just his role in the scheme, but the details of his testimony to the congressional committee that investigated the grounds for Trump’s first impeachment. At the behest of the State Department (which was clearly acting at the insistence of President Trump), Sondland initially refused to testify to Congress; he then testified, but lied by saying he never knew of a connection between U.S. aid to Ukraine and any conditions the Trump administration wanted in return; next, he almost immediately revised his testimony after his statements of innocence of such a plot were contradicted by other witnesses, even as he still withheld details of the president’s knowledge of the plot; and finally, a few weeks later, openly admitted that there was a “quid pro quo” plot directed at Ukraine aimed at manufacturing announcements of corruption investigations implicating Joe Biden, and also confessed that the president had very likely directed the scheme (though he still claimed no direct knowledge of this). That is, he obstructed the impeachment inquiry at various points until his position was made untenable by contradictory evidence. And not only did he seek to obscure his participation in the scheme (he may not have been a plotter, but he knowingly acted as an errand boy for its ends),but he also defended a corrupt president’s actions from full disclosure. He was a team player until he was not.
Sondland seems now to be attempting to build on the incremental goodwill he earned from the media and from opponents of President Trump because of the part his testimony played in proving the existence of the extortion scheme that led to President Trump’s first impeachment (apart from the Post interview, he has a memoir coming out this fall that The Hot Screen is excitedly not rushing to preorder; the tentative title is — and excuse me while I urple up my breakfast — “The Envoy: Mastering the Art of Diplomacy with Trump and the World”). But the former ambassador’s current effort to whitewash his involvement in a scheme that resulted in only the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history deserves only scorn and rebuttal — not simply because of the actual, malicious role he played in subordinating U.S. national interests to Donald Trump’s re-election effort, but because of the entirety of his problematic service as ambassador to the EU, which reveals other levels of incompetence and corruption that implicate both Sondland and the system that placed him in such an important position in the first place.
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To begin at the beginning: Gordon Sondland was appointed as EU ambassador after giving a $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration, in what was openly understood to be a reward for his contribution. It’s worth noting that Sondland made this donation after withdrawing his previous support for Trump during the Republican presidential campaign (following Trump’s attacks on a Gold Star father who had dared to criticize him, which led to a premature belief in the demise of the candidate’s prospects). Sondland wanted to get right with the new president after showing this previous lack of faith, and had incentives to abase himself with Trump should future opportunities arise. It should be noted, though, that his assumption of an ambassadorship was hardly a uniquely Trump-era corruption — both parties have long appointed donors to such positions. In this respect, Sondland’s “public service” started in a familiarly sordid fashion, but would soon spiral down to sewer levels under distinct Trumpian pressures.
Prior to his emergence into public awareness in connection with the Ukraine scheme, Sondland’s ambassadorship was marked by ineptness and inattentiveness. As the Washington Post reported back in 2019,
In Brussels, Sondland garnered a reputation for his truculent manner and fondness for the trappings of privilege. He peppered closed-door negotiations with four-letter words. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon support staff to refill his teacup.
Sondland seemed to chafe at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings in Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being indiscreet, and was chastised for using his personal phone for state business, officials said.
Sondland also shuttled repeatedly back to Washington, often seeking face time with Trump.
Of course, we now know that his lack of attention to EU matters, particularly his devotion of so much time working on non-EU member Ukraine issues, was ultimately tied to the president’s extortion plot.
Beyond his peculiar work habits, Sondland’s tenure was shadowed by accusation of venality and corruption. According to another Washington Post article, Sondland spent nearly $1 million in taxpayer money upgrading his Brussels residence, including $400,000 in kitchen renovations, $30,000 for a sound system, and “$95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola and electric heating, LED lighting strips and a remote-control system”:
The renovations at the E.U. ambassador’s residence, which include $33,000 for handmade furniture from Italy, appeared driven by Sondland’s lavish tastes rather than practical needs, people familiar with the matter said.
Two former U.S. officials said Sondland delighted in the trappings of being an American ambassador in Brussels.
“He got addicted,” one former official said. “The way you’re treated as a senior U.S. official, there’s nothing like it in terms of adrenaline and ego boost.”
So even absent his involvement in the Ukraine scheme, Sondland was a shining example of American elites failing upward, in this case buying himself into an important diplomatic role absent relevant experience, skills, or aptitude. This was not public service, as an ambassadorship should ideally be, but self-service.
A full accounting of Sondland’s time in government should also take into account the way his relationship to Trump mirrored the sycophancy of so many of his administration peers, the soiling submission to the will of a corrupt and egomaniacal president out of an apparent eagerness to stay in his good graces. I noted above the backpedaling Sondland felt compelled to do after canceling a fundraiser for Trump, and it seems likely that his willingness to be complicit with Trump’s betrayal of the national interest flowed in part from a continued need to assuage a president who placed personal loyalty only below his deranged self-centeredness.
This is not to say that Gordon Sondland is an evil or even a bad man. Like all of us, he’s complicated, and his life story certainly its elements of sympathy. His parents had fled Nazi Germany to settle in the U.S., and this appears to have played some role in his wish for an ambassadorship; one acquaintance told The Seattle Times 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.”” And his previous business career resulted in him becoming a successful hotelier in the Pacific Northwest.
But the crux of the matter is that Sondland was involved in a heinous scheme to subvert an American election, yet to this day shows no apparent acknowledgement of his role, let alone repentance or remorse. Rather than simply say that he made a mistake, and try to make amends, he attempts to whitewash his role with questionable assertions about his true intentions and heroism in these grisly matters. The question of how to respond to Sondland’s participation in the depravities of the Trump administration has always felt extremely grounded to me, as his connections to Portland (he has lived here and had hotels in the city) raised nitty-gritty issues of how his fellow residents should treat such disservice to the United States. Sondland long sought to burnish his reputation through charitable donations, including to the Portland Art Museum; after his involvement in the Ukraine shakedown, such activities took on the sheen of reputational laundering. A healthy country and community should shun and shame those who betray it, not accept their self-aggrandizing excuses at face value, or simply turn the page as if horrid events never happened. I am not saying that Sondland should be ostracized from polite society (at any rate, he now lives in Florida, so he has already inflicted that particular punishment on himself), but I am saying that it is worthwhile for a community to judge when certain people are no longer deserving of respect.
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And this is where the Washington Post profile of Sondland flirts with becoming part of the former ambassador’s whitewash effort. With a tone combining bemusement (“No one’s gotten the Gordon Sondland part of the story exactly right, according to Gordon Sondland”) and belittlement (“Do you remember Gordon Sondland?”), the piece conveys Sondland’s self-aggrandizing efforts without offering nearly sufficient factual counterpoints to his wish to present himself as an early defender of the Ukrainian people and Vladimir Zelensky. To be crystal clear: if Sondland had had a sincere interest in protecting both Ukranian and U.S. interests, he would have gone to State Department lawyers or the Washington press with his knowledge of the shocking plot to gin up false accusations against Joe Biden by withholding vital military supplies to Ukraine. Rather than do so, he helped convey this blackmail message to Ukraine. These are contemptible actions, not heroic ones. He was a willing servant of a corrupt scheme. His self-justifications are like those of a get-away driver who claims innocence because he didn’t actually rob the bank.
The article, to its credit, does pin Sondland down on his hypocrisy (he refuses three times to give a straight answer as to whether he should have tried to stop the scheme). But though the piece explicitly asks, “What did happen? How should we make sense of Gordon Sondland’s cameo in this disorienting period of American politics?”, it provides far too much space for Sondland’s self-justifications, even as it repeats criticisms of his role in the Ukraine affair made by foreign policy experts people like John Bolton, Fiona Hill, and Alexander Vindman. Sondland is even allowed a riposte to these far more credible foreign policy professionals —“Everyone who writes these books, especially this group, think they’re hot s---, right? And they’re not. They’re human beings, right? They made mistakes. I made mistakes.” — but the details of Sondland’s actual activities in pursuit of a corrupt presidential plot are not recapped.
Instead, a critique is leveled at the far lesser matters of the tone and tenor of Sondland’s self-defenses in his upcoming memoir:
His version of history, recorded with the help of a ghostwriter, is both boastful and self-deprecating. His motivations were rooted in both “a desire to make a difference” and “a desire to be noticed.” He disparages “the global diplomatic system” as anachronistic, prissy, overpopulated (“There are just too many people”). He calls Bolton “extremely insecure,” Hill “a whiner” and Vindman’s heroic reputation “far from the truth.”
There’s also an interview with a Duke University political science professor who’s also a friend of Sondland, and who, not surprisingly, tells the Washington Post that, “Since I have talked with him over the years about foreign policy, I find the account he gives of his motivations and what he was trying to accomplish quite plausible.” As the article notes that Sondland’s family foundation has given Duke University $2 million in donations, I would judge the low credibility and basic irrelevance of such a character assessment to also be “quite plausible.”
Ultimately, it’s the article’s framing of Sondland as some sort of nostalgia trip, like an 80’s band profiled in a “where are they now” VH1 puff piece, that feels grotesquely off base. The concluding paragraphs, presented as one final possible answer to the “story” of Gordon Sondland, are like fingernails on a chalkboard every time I’ve read them:
Maybe the Gordon Sondland part of the story is what it always appeared to be.
“Yes, I’m the quid pro quo guy,” he writes in the memoir, “but you know what? Everything in life is some kind of a quid pro quo.”
With Sondland’s call-back to the “quid pro quo” assertion from the impeachment hearings (when he finally fully testified that he was aware of a plot to premise U.S. aid in exchange for Ukrainian announcement of a Biden-harming investigation), but with the twist of turning it into a punchline in which Sondland gets the last word and essentially condones the corrupt maneuver that Trump tried to make, the Post piece lands with a whimper on a message of inconsequence: let bygones be bygones, what’s done is done, all the world’s a stage, everything’s a quid pro quo, so get over it.
But the salience of Sondland to our American narrative isn’t what sort of “story” he’d like to sell us, or what sort of person he is, but what he actually did that brought him to our collective attention in the first place. And what he did was play a central role in a conspiracy that the House of Representatives deemed worthy of impeaching a president for — a conspiracy that illicitly placed the president’s foreign policy powers in service of a plan to destroy a political rival and upend the 2020 election. This is the true Sondland story, whether he likes it or not. This is what we must remember. If the former ambassador can’t even admit that he did wrong, and begin to proffer amends and apologies to the American people, then any rehabilitation of his reputation should be made impossible by the media and the citizenry. (Damningly, he writes in his memory that he would consider supporting Trump for president in 2024 — an important clue to a broken moral compass and lack of repentance for his role as lackey to a corrupt president). The scheme he helped along was a grave offense against the country, and his role in it must not be forgotten or forgiven.