May 28 to June 4, Washington and Brussels
On May 28, Bill Taylor drove the five miles from his home in Arlington to State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, not far from the Lincoln Memorial. It was a drive he had made hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. This trip was particularly important. Secretary Pompeo had agreed to see him to discuss the ambassador’s job in Kyiv. As Taylor navigated Washington traffic, the reservations he had been hashing over for weeks were buzzing in his head. Soon, he would have to decide: in or out?
Taylor arrived alone, took the elevator to the seventh floor and was escorted into a conference room next to the secretary’s office. Soon he was joined by Kurt Volker, Pompeo adviser Ulrich Brechbuhl and finally by Pompeo. Suspecting he wouldn’t have much time with them, Taylor wasted none of it. He laid out his worries, including his fear that Trump was going to abandon the administration’s strong support of Kyiv in pursuit of a deal with Putin.
“I think your boss doesn’t like Ukraine,” Taylor told Pompeo.
The secretary acted as though he had been expecting that. In public, Pompeo could come across as hotheaded and defensive. Privately with Taylor, he was calm and confident.
“Bill, you’re right,” the secretary said. “And it’s my job to turn him around.”
Taylor liked the sound of that. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he had hoped Pompeo might listen. They were both West Point alums, 17 years apart. Both had excelled in engineering; the younger Pompeo had ranked first in his class and Taylor had finished fifth.
Pompeo used a physics equation, their common language, to explain his strategy for handling Trump on Ukraine: “Force equals pressure over a period of time.” In other words, he would continue to make the case, and eventually, he would bring Trump around.
Sitting across from the secretary, Taylor knew that the equation was “force equals pressure times area,” but he kept his mouth shut. He understood what Pompeo was telling him. He asked about the congratulatory letter to Zelensky that Trump had refused to sign, saying he was told the president had torn it up.
“I hadn’t heard about that,” Pompeo told Taylor. He turned to Brechbuhl. “Find out about this,” Pompeo said, then promised he would do his best to get a letter signed as soon as possible.
Taylor was encouraged. Coming into the meeting, he had been skeptical of Pompeo, who had remained largely silent when Giuliani and his crowd had been bashing Marie Yovanovitch. Taylor could hear his wife Deborah’s words still ringing in his ears: “What makes you think they won’t do to you what they did to Masha?”
But this face-to-face discussion was giving Taylor a more nuanced impression of the secretary. The more they talked, the more he was convinced that they agreed on the fundamentals, that the best way to counter Russia was to maintain strong support for Zelensky.
Pompeo was saying what Taylor needed to hear, but he also heard caveats. He sensed that Pompeo needed to protect his relationship with Trump, who could be mercurial and vindictive. The secretary didn’t have a free hand. Taylor felt Pompeo would be limited in what he could say and do publicly on Taylor’s behalf if Giuliani and others turned against him. If Trump were to abandon Ukraine in favor of a rapprochement with Putin and Russia, Taylor told Pompeo, he would have to quit. They shook hands. Pompeo didn’t demand an answer on the spot. As Taylor drove home across the Potomac River, he found himself leaning toward taking the job—and taking the risks.
A day or so later, Taylor learned that Pompeo had prevailed on Trump to sign a new congratulatory letter for Zelensky, promising a White House meeting at some undetermined date. The May 29 letter was a good start, Taylor hoped, in a new chapter in Trump’s relations with Zelensky and Ukraine.
It was also a lesson for Taylor in how Trump’s Washington worked. Pompeo hadn’t worked through John Bolton and the usual National Security Council channels. Trump’s signature on that letter was the result of a process that Taylor still didn’t quite understand. But now it was the world he was walking into, with eyes wide open.
A few days later, Taylor returned to the State Department and picked up Trump’s letter to Zelensky, tucked into a manila envelope. The Ukrainians had already received an electronic copy, but Taylor wanted one he could deliver when he arrived in Kyiv in a few weeks. By then, he hoped, a date for the White House meeting would be set.
It would be a good start to his return to the ambassador’s role.
Late in May, Diana Pilipenko, an investigator for the Democratic staff of the House Intelligence Committee, was working with her colleagues on a memo for their boss, chairman Adam Schiff. For weeks, she had been scouring Ukrainian and Russian news sites, YouTube channels, social media, any news sources that mentioned Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine. The committee was trying to figure out Giuliani’s agenda, go deeper. He was the president’s lawyer for the Mueller investigation. That was over. Now what was he up to?
Pilipenko had been hired by the committee because of her Russian language fluency and expertise in tracking illicit international financing. But she happened to have been born in Ukraine, and her ability to speak and read Ukrainian was a fortuitous break. For months, she and other committee investigators had been largely focused on Trump’s business activity related to Moscow, including discussions about a proposed Trump Tower that was never built.
They had been aware that Giuliani was making noise about Ukraine, but a May 9 article in the New York Times by Kenneth P. Vogel really caught their attention. It was headlined, “Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump.” It said Trump’s personal lawyer “is encouraging Ukraine to wade further into sensitive political issues in the United States, seeking to push the incoming government in Kiev to press ahead with investigations that he hopes will benefit Mr. Trump.” The article also said Giuliani planned to travel to Kyiv “to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries” about “two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump.”
Giuliani’s agenda sounded crazy. The president’s lawyer was to meet a foreign leader and press him to meddle in U.S. politics for Trump’s benefit? Hard to believe, but this was straight from Giuliani’s own mouth. According to the article, Giuliani was looking into whether Ukrainians had secretly worked to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, as well as Hunter Biden’s role with the Burisma gas company, for which he was paid $50,000 or more a month.
“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Giuliani said of his planned trip. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy—I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already, and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
The article was raising all kinds of questions and red flags for the committee staff. Pilipenko was well suited to look for the answers. Before joining Schiff’s team, she had worked on money-laundering and anti-corruption cases at Deloitte, the huge accounting firm, and the Center for American Progress, a progressive D.C. think tank. Her master’s degree from Harvard had focused on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The Giuliani connection wasn’t new to Pilipenko and her colleagues. They had seen the John Solomon stories in The Hill that first aired Lutsenko’s allegations, and they had noticed that Giuliani had been appearing on Fox News and elsewhere to unload on Ukraine, the Bidens, the Clintons, Marie Yovanovitch and the Mueller probe. On May 1 in the Times, Vogel had published an in-depth story about Hunter Biden and Burisma, noting Giuliani’s role in pushing the media to write about it.
The staff’s memo on Giuliani’s Ukraine activity kept getting longer. The idea was to help Schiff understand Ukraine’s complicated political landscape and how Giuliani might be working it. Pilipenko found and translated articles in the Ukrainian press that mentioned Giuliani. The staff knew that in memos for the boss, the more detail the better. This was his method, his way of absorbing information.
Schiff, who was about to turn 59, had made a career of untangling complex plots. After law school at Harvard and a clerkship for a federal judge in Los Angeles, he had served as an assistant U.S. attorney for six years. He led the prosecution of Richard W. Miller, the first FBI agent ever to be indicted on a charge of espionage, who was eventually convicted of trading classified documents to the Soviet Union for gold and cash.
That sort of case—intricate, complicated, challenging—appealed to Schiff. He liked working on these puzzles better than running for office. As the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, he could marshal the resources to conduct an investigation of consequence. He wasn’t yet sure whether Ukraine qualified, but the completed memo intrigued him. He read it again, then set it aside, then read it again.
Schiff told his people, already working seven days a week, to keep digging.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s first foreign trip as Ukraine’s president was not to America, as he had hoped, but it sure looked like it. On June 4, he joined a gala Fourth of July celebration, hosted by E.U. ambassador Gordon Sondland in Brussels. It was a lavish Yankee Doodle Dandy affair with European Union flourishes.
That this Independence Day–themed party was being held a month early didn’t seem to matter. Hundreds of guests milled around Autoworld, a cavernous Brussels museum filled with antique cars. The food stations featured all-American fare: pizza, hamburgers and fries and Jelly Belly dispensers filled with lime, cherry and tutti-frutti flavors. Servers in red-white-and-blue bow ties offered Veuve Clicquot French champagne and Stella Artois Belgian beer, displaying America’s affection for their allies’ alcohol.
On a stage flanked by the U.S. and E.U. flags, Sondland introduced Jay Leno, and the former late-night TV star delivered an American stand-up routine. The SHAPE International Band, made up of musicians from the 29 NATO nations, played classic American tunes. The event was underwritten by 36 major corporations, including several from Sondland’s home region in the Pacific Northwest: Microsoft, Starbucks, Nike, Expedia and Boeing.
Zelensky and his wife, Olena, were welcomed as honored guests. Since the discouraging May 23 Oval Office session with Trump, Sondland had seen some evidence of a thaw in the president’s ice-cold attitude toward Ukraine and the country’s new president. He had written Zelensky and promised him a White House meeting. Sondland wasn’t quite sure why. But at least he did it.
Now Zelensky was in Brussels, working the crowd. So was Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, an emissary straight from the White House inner circle. Surely that was a good sign, the Ukrainians thought. Zelensky mingled with the U.S. officials who were key to his country’s security and prosperity. He was meeting with European officials, too, assuring them of his anti-corruption, pro-West policies.
But nothing was of higher priority for Zelensky and his team than creating good relations with Trump—and proving that he was not, as Rudy Giuliani had so publicly alleged, surrounded by “enemies” of Trump and America. So he schmoozed with the Americans beneath a massive U.S. flag and gave a thumbs-up sign as he posed for a photo with Leno—two comedians, one the Ukrainian president and the other an American icon.
Performing a diplomatic warm-up act for “my old friend Jay Leno,” Sondland joked that he knew the party was “a little early, but what’s a month among friends?” He saluted U.S.-Europe relations, cheerfully glossing over the ongoing friction between the Trump administration and America’s traditional European allies: “In spite of our relatively minor, though headline-grabbing, differences this is a relationship that delivers results for ourselves and others. Everyone in this room is part of that story.”
Sondland, too, was part of that story. A year earlier, he was a wealthy hotelier and generous Republican Party donor. Now, he was an ambassador demonstrating his diplomatic showmanship to the European Union community. For Sondland, at 61, the ambassador’s job was like a basketball star giving baseball a try.
He had never held a position in government before. He was the son of immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany and made their way to Seattle, where they later established a dry-cleaning business. He amassed a fortune by acquiring and managing luxury hotels. He and his wife established themselves as prominent philanthropists, making major donations to the Seattle and Portland art museums. They were proud of their personal art collection, which Sondland had put in the “$5 million to $25 million” category when he filled out his federal financial disclosure form.
He portrayed himself as close to Trump, but he hadn’t started out that way. He was a longtime supporter of establishment Republicans, supporting Jeb Bush in the 2016 campaign. When Bush dropped out, Sondland switched his allegiance to Trump, becoming one of his co-chairmen for Oregon and Washington State.
It wasn’t a comfortable fit. Upset with Trump’s anti-immigrant comments, Sondland removed himself as a sponsor of a Seattle fundraiser for the candidate. He issued a statement, through a company spokesman, explaining his change of heart. Trump’s “constantly evolving positions” were at odds with his “personal beliefs and values,” he said, and he could no longer support Trump’s candidacy. Sondland didn’t stay away for long, though. After Trump was elected, he routed $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund, using a collection of companies that obscured his involvement.
In Brussels, Sondland quickly developed a reputation for being amiable, stubborn and fond of the trappings of the ambassador’s job. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon staff to refill his teacup. He ordered up expensive renovations at the U.S. ambassador’s baronial residence. Sondland thought the property needed updating, but one U.S. senior official described the various expenditures—$25,000 to an American rug company, thousands more for new furniture and custom woodworking—as “18th century Jefferson-in-Paris behavior.”
Sondland sometimes chafed at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings to Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being careless about security and was chastised for using his personal phone for government business. He shuttled frequently back to Washington, often seeking face time with Trump on his visits. When he couldn’t gain entry to the Oval Office, he would meet with Mulvaney. Some at the NSC thought Sondland exaggerated how much time Trump and Mulvaney gave him.
Now, at his early Fourth of July extravaganza, Sondland was in his element: America’s host and toastmaster, introducing Leno to a gathering of European leaders and conveying the best wishes of President Trump.
Immediately afterward, Sondland presided over a private dinner for 24 at the U.S. Mission’s building in central Brussels. Sondland sat at the center of the long table, directly across from Kushner. Guests included the president of Poland, the prime ministers of Romania and Georgia and a collection of other European and NATO dignitaries. Energy secretary Rick Perry sat next to Leno. Ulrich Brechbuhl and Phil Reeker were there, representing the State Department. The U.S. ambassador to Poland, prominent Republican activist Georgette Mosbacher, stood out in the sea of blue suits with her flame-red hair, bright red pantsuit and stars-and-stripes scarf.
Zelensky was on Kushner’s immediate right, not quite the Oval Office meeting that Zelensky wanted so badly, but a step in the right direction. Why would the president’s son-in-law sit with a man who, as Giuliani had claimed, had people around him consorting with enemies of Trump and America?