Gordon Sondland is no dummy, that is apparent from the sequence of events that occurred before the American people on Tuesday.
Sondland, a wealthy hotelier who wound up as US Ambassador to the EU, looks ready to head on home. He’s now been implicated in a complex conspiracy theory cooked up by the Democrats and he would simply rather be back in the Pacific Northwest counting his billions.
As such, Sondland made the choice to release his opening statement to the press ahead of his testimony, to push the needle in his favor before the first question was asked of him. The “bombshells” in his testimony seemed to resonate across social and mainstream media as well, with even the often-conservative Fox News finding themselves characterizing today as disastrous for the Trump presidency.
From Fox News’ Chris Wallace:
“I think what Gordon Sondland was trying to do here is protect himself more than he is to protect anybody else. To a certain degree took out the bus and ran it over President Trump, Vice President Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney. He implicates all of them.”
He continued, “I think one of the keys is going to be going to the specific points of contact between him and the president because there are a couple of points where he says it was abundantly clear, my personal presumption, my belief and he is not saying directly that the president told him these things. And specifically, he says the president never told me that there was any condition between aid as opposed to the White House meeting between military aid and Zelensky announcing the investigations.”
Sondland’s insinuations were torn to shreds, however, by GOP committee members and the President himself, who, on the lawn of the White House, recited several damning lines from a transcript of a phone call between he and the Ambassador.
