Ambassador Sondland hasn’t exactly been smart up until now, so if he gets bad legal advice, he’ll take the Fifth. Hopefully he’ll get good legal advice.
In general, good legal advice would be to take the Fifth for someone situated as he is right now.
But in this case, with this ‘president’, one cannot give adequate legal advice without factoring in the political situation. The White House and Barr may be threatening Sondland with perjury charges if he changes his testimony, more on that below.
Adding to Gordian Knot is the fact that there is pre-existing intermediate testimony that already conflicts with his earlier deposition testimony.
Because of this hopeless complexity – the fact that Barr may very well charge him later but that he also (and more likely) may be charged later when the ‘president’ is long gone – and the inherent unreliability of the ‘president’, Sondland’s best long-term hope is to come clean today and tell the truth about not only Pompeo, but also Trump.
We’re about to find out what kind of advice he is getting this morning.
As he arrives at the Capitol, he looks relaxed like a man who is going to take the Fifth. But nothing would surprise me. He is wealthy after all.
It’s a great day for America.
Sondland is not taking the Fifth.
NYT headline : ‘We followed the President’s Order on Ukraine Pressure Campaign’ Ambassador Sondland
Mr. Sondland testified to what we’ve all been watching since 2015.
His testimony was that there was no “irregular” channel. Instead, the entire apparatus of the Donald Trump and his administration was committed to making the extortion and bribery the US foreign policy toward Ukraine.
Donald Trump behaves as a Russian asset. His administration enthusiastically supports that behavior.
This impeachment can’t stop at Donald Trump.
Sondland says there was ‘quid pro quo’ involving Trump and Ukraine
Washington Post headline
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, said the vote to remove or acquit the President could lose the Senate majority. In his view, Donald Trump is totally guilty after today’s testimony from Sondland. As Tom alluded to above, Pompeo and Pence were not only intimately involved in this corrupt effort, but instructed their associates to lie about it. The noose is certainly tightening on this presidency.
Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney : “Who would benefit from an investigation of Biden?”
Sondland : “Trump”.
This was the worst part of the Dem questioning. Maloney was doing nothing but fishing for this soundbite.
I interpret this very differently from you.
I think Mr. Maloney was attempting to put the role of Russia and Vladimir Putin front-and-center.
We hear passive and inaccurate characterizations of a long and growing list of behaviors that actively mislead the public, along the lines of:
– “Unusual”
– “Erratic”
– “Harmful to US interests”
– “Misguided”
– “Narcissistic”
– etc., etc., etc.
While these are all true as far as they go, they miss the point.
ALL of these behaviors act to benefit Russia and Vladimir Putin. The lie that Ukraine was the source of 2016 election meddling is not just fictional — it actively promotes actual Russian propaganda started by Vladimir Putin in Hungary. Our news media and our elected representatives have been extraordinarily reluctant to talk about this.
I think Mr. Maloney was attempting to break through this code of silence and I thank him for it.