- Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, acknowledged telling an aide to Ukraine's president that U.S. military aid was tied to a public statement of "corruption" from Kyiv, according to a supplemental statement from Sondland that was part of a transcript released Tuesday of the envoy's closed-door deposition Oct. 17 before congressional investigators.
President Trump, through a pressure campaign led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, wanted Ukraine to investigate debunked conspiracy theories related to the 2016 election and the actions of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, which the president and his supporters say amount to corruption.
"I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks," Sondland writes, noting that he now recalls a Sept. 1 meeting in which he told that to an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
That conversation followed a meeting between Vice President Pence and Zelenskiy, "in which President Zelenskiy had raised the issue of the suspension of U.S. aid to Ukraine directly with Vice President Pence," Sondland notes.