Donald Trump has a whole new Gordon Sondland problem
Of the dozen-plus witnesses who have testified behind closed doors to the House impeachment committee, the only one of them who even tried to partially help Donald Trump was U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who insisted that he wasn’t aware of any quid pro quo. Then after everyone else testified that Sondland was the quid pro quo ringleader, Sondland revised his testimony and suddenly ‘recalled’ all the crimes that he and Trump committed.
This was bad enough for Donald Trump, because it meant that one of his own Ukraine scandal henchmen was directly selling him out, in an attempt at keeping himself out of prison. It shredded any smidgeon of deniability that Trump might have been trying to cling to. Sondland’s decision to belatedly flip could end up being looked back at as a pivotal moment in Trump’s downfall. Now Trump has a whole new Sondland problem.
Televised House impeachment hearings are set to kick off on Wednesday morning, with the witnesses you’d expect, such as Bill Taylor and George Kent. But on Tuesday night, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced that Gordon Sondland will publicly testify next week. This means House Democrats consider Sondland’s revised testimony to be credible enough that it’s worth having him rat out Trump on live national television for all to see.
Gordon Sondland has gone from being a guy who donated a million dollars to Donald Trump and helped carry out Trump’s criminal Ukraine antics, to a guy who sorta kinda tried to protect Trump during his initial closed-door testimony, to a guy who is now about to go on television and destroy Trump. Sondland is no John Dean, but he doesn’t have to be. He just has to be believed by a majority of Americans – and he will be.
