Wow, it turns out Bill Taylor’s testimony against Donald Trump was even uglier than we thought
Earlier this afternoon, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu emerged from Bill Taylor’s impeachment testimony and announced that it was “incredibly damning” against Donald Trump. We expected that it would be, given Taylor’s already-documented role in pushing back against Trump’s Ukraine antics. But now the details are surfacing, and its even uglier for Trump than how Lieu described it.
Bill Taylor’s opening statement has been obtained by the Washington Post, and it’s ugly for Donald Trump beyond words. Taylor is confirming that Trump did indeed tell his own people that Ukraine couldn’t have anything – no military aid, no White House meeting – unless the President of Ukraine made a public statement confirming that he was going to launch an investigation into the fake Biden scandal.
Notably, Taylor says that Gordon Sondland told him all of this in exact words. This doesn’t appear to jibe at all with what’s leaked out thus far about Sondland’s recent closed door testimony, and it raises further doubt about Sondland’s honesty. Fiona Hill recently testified that John Bolton directly confronted Sondland over the quid pro quo, but Sondland reportedly testified that none of this ever happened.
Bill Taylor’s testimony is backed up by the detailed contemporaneous notes he was taking the entire time this scandal was playing out. We presume that Taylor gave these notes to the House impeachment inquiry, and that they’ll serve as key evidence in impeachment proceedings going forward.
