Why William Taylor’s testimony shook Washington

An almost ten-hour testimony from America’s acting ambassador to Ukraine has thrown Washington into disarray amid the ongoing impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

William Taylor told congressional investigators how Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor and political appointee to the position of ambassador to the EU, had in fact become a lynchpin of “irregular” US policy towards Ukraine, led by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and with a direct link to the Oval Office.

Sondland, said Taylor, was engaged by Trump and Guilianni to persuade Ukraine’s government to launch a public corruption investigation into Trump’s rival for the 2020 US presidential race, Joe Biden. It comes a month after details of Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky came to light.

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The issue of the quid pro quo

When US Senator Lindsay Graham was challenged on his zealous defence of Trump in the face of accusations that the US president used the tools of US foreign policy for personal political gain, he gave one concession: “If you could show me that, you know, Trump was actually engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.”

That is exactly what Taylor did.

According to Taylor, Sondland had initially dangled a White House meeting with Trump for Ukraine as a prize for publicly announcing an investigation into Biden.

He said Sondland had later told him “that he now recognised that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials... that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations”.

“In fact,” said Taylor, “Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance.”

The problem here is not with quid pro quos per se. Strong-arming, playing dirty, even hitting below the belt, are legitimate forms of statecraft. The problem in this case, Taylor argued, is the use of these tactics to coerce a vital ally and a cornerstone of regional stability, all in the name of domestic political benefit, as opposed to the national interest.

Taylor’s revelations shook Washington because “in an instant, the impeachment inquiry no longer rested on the credibility or motives of a whistleblower”, writes Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, but of a senior US diplomat, and because they directly contravene the president’s account of events.

It was, says Peter Baker in The New York Times, “by far the most damning account yet to become public in the House impeachment inquiry - Mr. Taylor described a president holding up $391 million in assistance for the clear purpose of forcing Ukraine to help incriminate Mr. Trump’s domestic rivals”.

What else did Taylor say in his testimony?

Taylor talked of his distaste at how the White House was handling the issue. “Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a cheque to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the cheque,” Taylor recounted.

“I argued… the explanation made no sense: the Ukrainians did not ‘owe’ President Trump anything, and holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was ‘crazy’.”

Taylor said that Trump’s threat to withhold military aid put allies’ lives at risk as they struggled to confront the Russian-led invasion. “More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the US assistance,” he said.

He also talked of secrecy around the president’s behavior. “On July 25, President Trump and President Zelensky had the long-awaited phone conversation. Strangely, even though I was Chief of Mission and was scheduled to meet with President Zelensky along with Ambassador Volker the following day, I received no readout of the call from the White House. The Ukrainian government issued a short, cryptic summary.”

Washington erupts

Trump’s supporters seemed unbowed by Taylor's testimony. According to the White House spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, impeachment proceedings are nothing more than “a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the constitution”.

Yesterday, about two dozen Republicans members breached security on Capitol Hill and “essentially stormed a closed-door session connected to the impeachment investigation of President Trump, prompting House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to suspend the proceedings in a remarkable scene,” Fox News reports. “Let us in! Let us in!” they chanted.

Conservatives tweeted and broadcast from restricted areas of the Capitol where technology is forbidden. They accused House Democrats of lacking transparency and claimed Democrats were obsessed with attacking a president they believe had done nothing to deserve impeachment.

“The demonstration came a day after members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met with Trump at the White House, where the president urged the group to be ‘tough’,” reports The Washington Post.

Republicans’ indignation is directed at the fact that testimonies have been held largely in secret as Democrats seek to control the narrative. “Democrats argue that, lacking any defense of the substance of Mr. Trump’s actions, Republicans are attacking them over process,” The New York Times reports.

But The Guardian says: “In a process scrambled so far by misleading Trump tweets and relying in part on anonymous witnesses, the testimony of Taylor, a Vietnam veteran respected in both parties with 50 years of public service behind him, landed as a potential game-changer.”