Oct. 22, 2019
Ukraine Envoy Testifies Trump Linked Military Aid to Investigations
In closed-door testimony, William B. Taylor Jr., implicated President Trump personally in an effort to withhold security aid until Ukraine's leader agreed to publicly announce investigations of his rivals.
By Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos
WASHINGTON -- The top American diplomat in Ukraine on Tuesday gave impeachment investigators a vivid and impassioned account of how multiple senior administration officials told him that President Trump blocked security aid to Ukraine and refused to meet the country's leader until he agreed to publicly pledge to investigate Mr. Trump's political rivals.
In testimony to impeachment investigators delivered in defiance of State Department orders, the diplomat, William B. Taylor Jr., sketched out in remarkable detail a quid pro quo pressure campaign on Ukraine that Mr. Trump and his allies have long denied. He said the president sought to condition the entire United States relationship with Ukraine -- including a $391 million aid package [1] whose delay put Ukrainian lives in danger -- on a promise that the country would publicly investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family.
His account implicated Mr. Trump, citing multiple sources inside the government. Those include a budget official who said during a secure National Security Council conference call in July that she had been instructed not to approve the security assistance for Ukraine, and that, Mr. Taylor said, "the directive had come from the president."
Mr. Taylor referred repeatedly to notes and memos -- including a June 30 account of his conversation with the Ukrainian president -- that could provide new and potentially explosive avenues of investigation for Democrats as they march toward writing articles of impeachment.
He said he shared his notes with the State Department, which would not provide them to the committee, in line with its refusal to comply with a subpoena from impeachment investigators demanding documents about dealings with Ukraine. Lawmakers are now likely to redouble their efforts to obtain them.
It was the latest instance of a veteran civil servant expanding substantially on the allegations of an intelligence whistle-blower whose anonymous complaint [2] accused Mr. Trump of trying to enlist a foreign power to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf. That issue is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
Mr. Taylor unspooled the story during a dramatic 40-minute recitation in a secure room in the Capitol, as lawmakers listened silently. He described an awkward West Wing meeting where senior American officials brought competing agendas, leaving Ukrainian officials confused; a directive by a top diplomat to bar the transcribing or monitoring of a June phone call between United States officials and the Ukrainian president; and Mr. Taylor's own growing sense of alarm as he realized that State Department diplomats were being sidelined.
In a statement issued Tuesday evening, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, called the impeachment inquiry "a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution," adding that Mr. Trump "has done nothing wrong."
It was a striking description of Mr. Taylor, a West Point graduate with a nearly 50-year career as a diplomat, [3] and the other officials who have testified privately to fill out the picture of the president's conduct.
In his opening statement obtained by The New York Times, [4] Mr. Taylor described Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, as at the center of what he called an "irregular policy channel" that operated outside of -- and at odds with -- normal American foreign policymaking. He called the situation "a rancorous story about whistle-blowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption and interference in elections."
When he objected to Mr. Trump's efforts to tie security aid and a White House meeting to the investigations, Mr. Taylor said Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union and a Trump campaign donor, told him there was no quid pro quo. But then Mr. Sondland described just that, telling Mr. Taylor to think of Mr. Trump as a businessman looking to make sure he would benefit before he closed a deal.
"When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check," Mr. Taylor testified, quoting Mr. Sondland.
He also said it was Mr. Sondland who first told him that Mr. Trump was tying the entire relationship with Ukraine to his demands for investigations and to squeeze President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"Ambassador Sondland said that 'everything' was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance," Mr. Taylor told lawmakers on Tuesday. "He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky 'in a public box' by making a public statement about ordering such investigations."
Even as Mr. Taylor made his way to Capitol Hill to testify for what would be a nearly 10-hour deposition, the president sought to discredit the inquiry, comparing the impeachment investigation to a "lynching."
The president's comment on Twitter drew bipartisan outrage in public as Mr. Taylor made his case behind closed doors. And it proceeded amid signs that Republicans have grown weary of defending Mr. Trump's every utterance in his own defense.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused on Tuesday to confirm Mr. Trump's claim that the senator had described his July call with Mr. Zelensky as "perfect."
"I don't recall any conversation with the president on that phone call," Mr. McConnell told reporters.
Mr. Taylor's testimony directly contradicted Mr. Trump's denial of a direct link involving investigations into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president's son, or other Democrats.
The testimony also raised questions about the veracity of other prominent witnesses, including Mr. Sondland and Kurt D. Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, [5] who have said behind closed doors they had not been aware of any improper pressure tactics. While Mr. Volker offered a more innocuous version of events, investigators noted last week that Mr. Sondland repeatedly said he could not remember details about what they characterized as key events.
In his version, Mr. Taylor explicitly made it clear that Mr. Zelensky would not be invited to the White House or secure much-needed security aid unless the Ukrainian leader publicly announced that his country would start the investigations that Mr. Trump so badly wanted.
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who sat in on the deposition as a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that Mr. Taylor's testimony shed new light on a previously revealed text message [6] in which Mr. Taylor wrote that it was "crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign." [7]
He "drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between President Trump's decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelensky," Ms. Wasserman Schultz said.
Republicans defended Mr. Trump, accusing Democrats of exaggerating Mr. Taylor's testimony.
"I've been in there for 10 hours -- I can assure you there was no quid pro quo," said Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina. "I can tell you there is not evidence that there was any condition placed on the aid."
But in his testimony, Mr. Taylor captured in stunning relief the angst among diplomats and national security officials that the whistle-blower described. Where that official said that "more than a half-dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort," Mr. Taylor told lawmakers of specific conversations among diplomats and members of the administration who were alarmed by what they were seeing and hearing.
Mr. Taylor described a July 18 call in which he learned that the directive to withhold Ukraine's aid had come to the White House budget office directly from Mr. Trump, through his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
"In an instant I realized one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened," Mr. Taylor said in his testimony. He described how the entire national security apparatus -- including John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, the Defense Department and the State Department -- all objected to withholding the aid.
While Mr. Trump and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine's president did not feel any pressure from the United States, Mr. Taylor testified that the country's officials were well aware -- and wary -- of being drawn into any involvement in determining the president's political fortunes.
He told lawmakers that Alexander Danyliuk, the Ukrainian national security adviser, "conveyed to me that President Zelensky did not want to be used as a pawn in a U.S. re-election campaign."
Mr. Taylor returned to the top post in Ukraine in mid-June after the ambassador there, Marie L. Yovanovitch, was ousted in what she later testified [8] was her attempt to stand up to Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Taylor said he arrived only to discover "a weird combination of encouraging, confusing and ultimately alarming circumstances."
He testified about his growing realization that Mr. Trump had put in place "two channels of U.S. policymaking and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular," with the last group made up of Mr. Sondland, Mr. Volker, Mr. Giuliani and the energy secretary, Rick Perry.
Throughout the summer, Mr. Taylor said, it became clear that the irregular group was focused on only one thing: the investigations sought by the president. And at a July 18 meeting, Mr. Taylor said he learned that the president had held up "until further notice" all military aid needed to repel attacks from Russian-backed forces. [9]
About 10 days later, Mr. Taylor said he traveled to the front lines of Ukraine fighting in northern Donbas for a briefing from the country's commanders, who thanked him for the security assistance being provided by the United States government -- a moment he said made him "uncomfortable," because Mr. Taylor by then knew the aid was delayed.
He described seeing "armed and hostile Russian-led forces," and believing that "more Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance."
In one text message to Mr. Sondland, Mr. Taylor threatened to quit if Ukraine did not receive the assistance.
"I was serious," he said.
It was not the first time that Mr. Taylor said he had threatened to resign. He told lawmakers that he had informed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in May that he was prepared to resign if the United States stopped strongly supporting Ukraine. Days later, Mr. Taylor said he expressed his concerns to Mr. Bolton, who told him to raise them directly with Mr. Pompeo through official channels.
"I wrote and transmitted such a cable on Aug. 29, describing the 'folly' I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active," Mr. Taylor wrote in his statement. "I told the secretary that I could not and would not defend such a policy."
By September, Mr. Taylor said, Mr. Sondland told him that if Mr. Zelensky did not "clear things up" in public, the United States and Ukraine would be at a stalemate.
"I understood a 'stalemate' to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance," Mr. Taylor told the committee members.
Julian E. Barnes, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/us/politics/trump-un-biden-ukraine.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/us/politics/whistle-blower-complaint.html
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/us/politics/william-b-taylor-diplomat.html
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/22/us/politics/william-taylor-ukraine-testimony.html
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/us/politics/volker-giuliani-ukraine.html
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/04/us/politics/ukraine-text-messages-volker.html
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/kurt-volker-impeachment.html
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/us/politics/marie-yovanovitch-trump-impeachment.html
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-impeachment.html