U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland attends the EU-U.S. High-Level Forum on small modular reactors at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium October 21, 2019. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
The Hill: Second person heard call suggesting Trump cared more about 'investigations' than Ukraine: AP
A second official at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine overheard U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's call with President Trump about the need for an investigation by Ukraine, The Associated Press reported Thursday, citing an unidentified source.
Kyiv-based foreign service officer Suriya Jayanti also overheard the call, the wire service reported, citing a person briefed on what Jayanti overheard.
William Taylor, chargé d'affaires to Ukraine, testified Wednesday that someone on his staff overheard a July 26 call between Trump and Sondland during which Trump asked Sondland “about the investigations.”
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Update #1: Second person heard call suggesting Trump cared more about 'investigations' than Ukraine: AP (The Hill)
Update #2: Second U.S. embassy official reportedly heard Trump call with Sondland (Politico)
WNU Editor: In yesterday's testimony chargé d'affaires to Ukraine William Taylor testified that someone on his staff overheard a July 26 call between Trump and Sondland during which Trump asked Sondland “about the investigations.” In today's AP report .... AP source: Second US official in Kyiv heard Trump call (AP), an anonymous source is also saying the same thing. I am not impressed. If you are going to impeach the President you will need more than just hearsay, one anonymous source, and an opinion on what may or may not have been said.
5 comments:
Someone told them they heard 1/2 a phone conversation.
Alrighty then
President Donald Trump has always viewed life through the prism of his next real estate deal, betting he can just bulldoze opponents into giving him what he wants. But Washington doesn’t work that way.
Now, as he battles an impeachment inquiry that sprang from his alleged attempt to bully a foreign leader, those who know Trump say it’s in large measure because he never made the switch from the brash, no-holds-barred New York businessman portrayed in “The Art of the Deal” to the president of a country governed by laws and norms of behavior.
“He’s used to getting what he wants and he’s a tough street guy,” said Billy Procida, a former vice president for the Trump Organization. “He’s been dealing with subcontractors his whole life. You know what it’s like to deal with subcontractors? They’re all terrorists. They all want more money for the job and then you’ve got to fight them and say, ‘OK, quid pro quo, I’m going to give you this, you do that, I’ll give you this, you do that, if you don’t do this, I’m going to do that.’”
The disjuncture between the table-pounding imperatives of New York real estate and the delicacies of international diplomacy helps explain, these people say, why Trump is having trouble understanding why his “perfect” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, may have crossed a line.
“He does nothing without a quid pro quo,” said a former White House official. “Nothing. Whatever deal has got to be to his advantage.”
“He treats a lot of conversations and a lot of negotiations, including with foreign leaders, along those lines,” said another former White House official. “‘What is it that you want? Here’s what we want.’ How can we find a way to reach some kind of deal or accommodation where we both get what we want but in particular where I, representing the U.S., get what I want.”
These ex-officials weren’t at all surprised, therefore, to learn that Trump had asked Zelensky to do him a “favor” while nudging him to launch investigations of his political adversaries — a 30-minute conversation whose interpretation is at the heart of Democrats’ impeachment drive.
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's cell phone call to President Donald Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine this summer appears to be a shocking security breach that raises significant counterintelligence concerns, according to several former officials, who told CNN there is a high probability that intelligence agencies from numerous foreign countries, including Russia, were listening in on the conversation.
"If true, the cell phone call between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump is an egregious violation of traditional counterintelligence practices that all national security officials -- to include political appointee ambassadors such as Sondland -- are repeatedly made aware of," according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before retiring this summer.
"I cannot remember in my career any time where an ambassador in a high counterintelligence environment like Kiev would have such an unsecure conversation with a sitting president. This just should not happen," he said.
Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, revealed during the first public impeachment hearing Wednesday that a member of his staff, who was accompanying Sondland to meetings in Kiev, saw the ambassador call Trump from his cell phone and overheard the President asking about "the investigations."
This is what the duel for America's political soul looks like.
Why don't you expand your last 2 posts into a novel and sell it to the DNC so they can hand it out to all the faithful.
It would be interesting to learn how secure the cell phones are that are being used by Diplomats, etc.,. If they accessed only a US military satellite for communication purposes then they are probably safe, probably. But once the conversation is carried by a common carrier who is to say nobody else can listen to the calls or, for that matter to conversations when the cell is suppossidly turned off?
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