Six key moments from the interview of a top diplomat.
Welcome to the Impeachment Briefing. We spent the day poring over 300 pages of testimony by America's top diplomat in Ukraine. |
- Impeachment investigators released the deposition transcript of Bill Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, expanding on the opening statement that was published after his closed-door testimony last month. Mr. Taylor said he repeatedly warned other officials of the perils of tying a military assistance package to investigations of President Trump's political rivals.
- Mr. Taylor, who has served in every administration of both parties since 1985, is an esteemed figure in the world of diplomacy. In his testimony, he said that America's traditional foreign policy was being subverted by people outside the normal chain of command — particularly Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.
- House Democrats announced that they would hold public impeachment hearings next week. The first session, on Wednesday, will involve Mr. Taylor and George Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy. Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, will testify on Friday.
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A 'second channel' of American diplomacy |
 | | Bill Taylor on Capitol Hill in October, when he gave his closed-door testimony.Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times |
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Mr. Taylor's testimony gave us what might be the most detailed account yet of how and why Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine, a move that went against what he called the "unanimous opinion of every level of interagency discussion." Here are six key moments from the transcript. |
1. Mr. Taylor pinned the origins of the Ukraine plan on Mr. Giuliani, who Mr. Taylor said was acting in Mr. Trump's interests. |
| Mr. Taylor: I think the origin of the idea to get President Zelensky to say out loud he's going to investigate Burisma and 2016 election, I think the originator, the person who came up with that was Mr. Giuliani. |
| Representative Tom Malinowski: And he was representing whose interests in... |
| Mr. Taylor: President Trump. |
2. Mr. Taylor repeatedly described a "second channel" in American foreign policy, which he said operated beneath the official diplomatic channel and involved the efforts by Mr. Giuliani and Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, to secure the investigations. |
| "The regular channel is all of our interactions with Ukraine, and one of the very important components of that interaction with Ukraine is the security assistance. And the security assistance got blocked by this second channel. |
| My concern about the whole second track was that, apparently at the instigation of Mr. Giuliani, Ambassador Sondland and Ambassador Volker were conditioning an important component of our assistance on what would ultimately be a political action." |
3. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump have said those investigations were intended to root out "corruption" in Ukraine. But Mr. Taylor's testimony undermined those claims. |
| "The irregular channel seemed to focus on specific issues, specific cases, rather than the regular channel's focus on institution building. So the irregular channel, I think under the influence of Mr. Giuliani, wanted to focus on one or two specific cases, irrespective of whether it helped solve the corruption problem, fight the corruption problem." |
4. Mr. Taylor said that he directed other diplomats to steer clear of Mr. Giuliani. |
| "What the embassy tries to do, as a general rule, is stay out of either our domestic or Ukraine internal politics. So we have not — we have tried to avoid dealing certainly with Mr. Giuliani and the kind of efforts that he was interested in." |
5. Mr. Taylor described one day in June when Mr. Sondland crowded the usual suspects out of a phone call with Ukraine's president. |
| "Ambassador Sondland told me that the timing was going to change, that the time of the phone call was going to change. And I asked him something like, shouldn't we let everybody else know who's supposed to be on this call? And the answer was, don't worry about it. Even his staff, I think, were not aware that the time had changed." |
6. Mr. Taylor said that John Bolton, the former national security adviser, fought behind the scenes to stop Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Sondland from establishing a quid pro quo, including at a meeting with top Ukrainian officials. |
| "When Ambassador Sondland raised investigations in the meeting, that triggered Ambassador Bolton's antenna, political antenna, and he said, 'we don't do politics here.'" |
What else we're following |
- David Hale, the under secretary for political affairs at the State Department, became the first administration official this week to comply with investigators' requests to appear. Democrats planned to ask him about the ouster of Ms. Yovanovitch, and why he and others did not defend her against political attacks.
- Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, and Tony Sayegh, a former Treasury Department spokesman, are expected to join the White House communications team to work on impeachment messaging.
- House Democrats pulled their subpoena for testimony from Charles Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser who asked federal courts to rule on whether he could testify. They believed the litigation could slow down the impeachment investigation.
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