Lindsey Graham won't read impeachment depositions with quid pro quo evidence he said doesn't exist

House Democrats released hundreds of pages of transcribed impeachment depositions Tuesday, including testimony from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a key player in President Trump's Ukraine policy. Sondland, who testified two weeks ago that he did not recall U.S. military aid for Ukraine being conditioned on Kyiv opening investigations on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, changed his testimony in a "supplemental declaration" submitted Monday.

Sondland declared Monday that he did in fact tell a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that "resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks." He said Trump had not directly told him to offer this quid pro quo, but there was no other "credible explanation for the suspension" of the military aid. Five other administration officials have described a similar no-cash-unless-investigation scheme in their testimony.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that he isn't going to read any of the transcripts being released by House impeachment investigators, including Sondland's. "I've written the whole process off," he told CBS News. "I think this is a bunch of B.S." That's too bad, because Graham had some questions that Sondland's testimony might answer.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Graham also told Axios' Jonathan Swan in October that "if you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing." And Graham isn't the only Trump supporter who would be disturbed if he read the revised testimony from Sondland, a Trump donor seen as more loyal to the president than the career diplomats and national security officials whose testimony he is now corroborating.

You can, of course, find something both "off the rails wrong" and not impeachable.