An unsecured mobile phone call to Donald Trump from his top diplomat in Europe, who was sitting in an open-air restaurant, could yield the most direct evidence yet that the president himself pressured a foreign power to conduct politically motivated investigations.
The call was recounted to House impeachment investigators by David Holmes, the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, during a closed-door hearing on Friday, adding direct knowledge about Trump’s conduct to the case Democrats are building against him.
Holmes’s opening statement, reported by CNN, also raises the stakes for Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who was on the other end of the telephone call with Trump and is set to testify in public next week.
After a July 26 meeting in Kyiv with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Holmes said he, Sondland and two other embassy staffers went to a restaurant where the ambassador called Trump and said Zelenskiy “loves your ass.”
Trump, who was speaking loudly enough for Holmes to hear, then asked, “So, he’s gonna do the investigation?” -- an apparent reference to probes of former Vice President Joe Biden and the 2016 election, which Trump and his allies wanted Ukraine to pursue.
According to Holmes, Sondland replied “he’s gonna do it,” adding that Zelenskiy will do “anything you ask him to.”
Holmes said he later asked Sondland if the president cared about Ukraine, and Sondland said Trump did not “give a s--- about Ukraine.”
“I asked why not, and Ambassador Sondland stated that the president only cares about ‘big stuff,’” Holmes testified, according to the document posted by CNN. “I noted that there was ‘big stuff’ going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia, and Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant ‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation.”’