On June 28, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry—the third of the Three Amigos—and Ambassadors Sondland, Volker, and Taylor participated in a conference call to prepare for a discussion later that day with President Zelensky. During this preparatory call, Ambassador Volker explained that he planned to be “explicit” with President Zelensky in an upcoming one-on-one meeting in Toronto, Canada. Specifically, Ambassador Volker intended to inform President Zelensky that President Trump would require Ukraine to address “rule of law, transparency, but also, specifically, cooperation on investigations to get to the bottom of things” in order to “get the meeting in the White House.”466
For the subsequent call with President Zelensky on June 28, Ambassador Sondland sought to limit the number of U.S. government personnel listening in. According to Ambassador Taylor, Ambassador Sondland stated that he did not want to include “most of the regular interagency participants” and that “he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring” the call when President Zelensky was patched in. Ambassador Taylor testified that he considered Ambassador Sondland’s requests to be “odd.”467 During that call, President Zelensky and the U.S. officials discussed energy policy and the conflict with Russia in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian president also noted that he looked forward to the White House visit that President Trump had offered in a letter dated May 29.468
The exclusion of State Department staff and notetakers from the June 28 call was an early indication to Ambassador Taylor that separate channels of diplomacy related to Ukraine policy—an official channel and an irregular channel—were “diverging.” Ambassador Taylor testified:
- This suggested to me that there were the two channels. This suggested to me that the normal channel, where you would have staff on the phone call, was being cut out, and the other channel, of people who were working, again, toward a goal which I supported, which was having a meeting to further U.S.-Ukrainian relations, I supported, but that irregular channel didn’t have a respect for or an interest in having the normal staff participate in this call with the head of state.469
Given Ambassador Sondland’s efforts to exclude staff on the June 28 call with President Zelensky, Ambassador Taylor asked Ambassadors Sondland and Volker by text message how they planned to handle informing other U.S. officials about the contents of the call. Ambassador Volker responded: “I think we just keep it among ourselves to try to build working relationship and just get the d*** date for the meeting!”470 Ambassador Sondland then texted: “Agree with KV. Very close hold.”471 Nevertheless, Ambassador Taylor informed Mr. Kent about the call and wrote a memo for the record dated June 30 that summarized the conversation with President Zelensky.472
Ambassador Volker Pressed “Investigations” with President Zelensky in Toronto
On July 2, Ambassador Volker met with President Zelensky and his chief of staff on the sidelines of the Ukraine Reform Conference in Toronto. As he later texted to Ambassador Taylor, Ambassador Volker “pulled the two of them aside at the end and explained the Giuliani factor.”473 Ambassador Volker clarified that by “the Giuliani factor,” he meant “a negative
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