During his planned testimony before the House committees investigating impeachment on Thursday, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland plans to tell lawmakers that he wasn’t aware that Hunter Biden was at the center of the Trump pressure campaign he was helping to orchestrate.
According to the Washington Post, Sondland will testify that he didn’t know that Hunter Biden was a member of the Ukrainian gas board until after the whistleblower complaint came out and was unaware that some fellow government officials were concerned that Trump was trying to push for an investigation into his political rival.
According to a person with knowledge of Sondland’s testimony, the U.S. diplomat will be sure to paint Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani as the most central figure in the pressure effort and that Sondland, as well as the other U.S. diplomats at the center of the pressure campaign, were just trying to “understand through Rudy what the President’s concerns were and try to address them.” During Sondland’s discussions with Giuliani about Ukraine and Burisma, Giuliani never mentioned Biden, the person familiar with Sondland’s testimony told the Post.
That claim may face tough scrutiny, given Giuliani’s public appearances at the time in which he repeatedly raised Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma.
