Gordon Sondland has a whole new problem
The trouble with getting in bed with Donald Trump is that most of the things he does are criminal in nature, and most of the people associated with him are career criminals as well. It’s exceedingly difficult to associate with Trump on any level, and somehow not end up with criminal exposure of your own. That brings us to the matter of Gordon Sondland.
Up to now, it looked like Gordon Sondland’s only potential criminal exposure was for his role in Donald Trump’s Ukraine extortion plot. Sondland testified to the House impeachment inquiry last week that he didn’t know the full extent of the criminal scheme that Trump and Rudy Giuliani were running, and this could in fact serve as a viable legal defense for him. But now Sondland has another problem.
It’s already been widely reported that Gordon Sondland had his companies donate a million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration, and in return Trump appointed him as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. This is unethical, but if it’s done tacitly, it’s generally legal. However, Portland newspaper Willamette Week is reporting that Sondland also invested $200,000 into a company run by Elliott Broidy, a close Trump ally who was previously a key official in the Republican National Committee. That’s where things get dicey.
If Gordon Sondland was throwing money willy nilly at Donald Trump’s political allies in an attempt at buying influence, he now has to worry that he may have indeed crossed legal lines with regard to campaign finance laws. It doesn’t help that Broidy was raided by the Feds in early 2019, meaning they already have Broidy’s financial records, including the ones that tie him to Sondland. None of this demonstrates that Gordon Sondland has committed any financial crimes, but it does suggest that every inch his political donations will likely be examined by the Feds – and that tends to get dicey fast.
