President Trump’s willingness to accept foreign interference in a U.S. election during his interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos was consistent with tweets and interviews by Mr. Giuliani at this time. For example, on June 21, Mr. Giuliani tweeted:
- New Pres of Ukraine still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery of Pres Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Obama people.272
On June 18, Dr. Hill met with Ambassador Sondland at the White House. She “asked him quite bluntly” what his role was in Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland replied that “he was in charge of Ukraine.”273 Dr. Hill was taken aback and a bit irritated. She prodded Ambassador Sondland again and asked, “Who put you in charge of Ukraine?” Dr. Hill testified: “And, you know, I’ll admit, I was a bit rude. And that’s when he told me the President, which shut me up.”274
Dr. Hill tried to impress upon Ambassador Sondland the “importance of coordinating” with other national security officials in the conduct of Ukraine policy, including the NSC staff and the State Department. Ambassador Sondland “retorted” that he was “coordinating with the President” and Mr. Mulvaney, “filling in” Ambassador Bolton, and talking to State Department Counselor Ulrich Brechbuhl. Ambassador Sondland asked: “Who else did he have to inform?”275
Dr. Hill stated that, in hindsight, with the benefit of the sworn testimony by others during the impeachment inquiry and seeing documents displayed by witnesses, she realized that she and Ambassador Sondland were working on two fundamentally different tasks. Dr. Hill testified:
- But it struck me when yesterday, when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails and who was on these emails, and he said, These are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy, and those two things had just diverged. So he was correct. And I had not put my finger on that at the moment, but I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn’t fully coordinating. And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.276
Reflecting on her June 18 conversation with Ambassador Sondland, Dr. Hill concluded:
- Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been. And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things had diverged. And I realized, in fact, that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland, because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out, and we were doing something that we thought was just as—or perhaps even more important, but it wasn’t in the same channel.277
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