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WEDNESDAY,NOVEMBER6,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO A

After that sit-down, Mr. Sondland pulled aside

Andriy Yermak, one of the Ukrainian Presi-

dent’s top advisers.

“I said that resumption of U.S. aid would like-

ly not occur until Ukraine provided the public

anti-corruption statement that we had been

discussing for many weeks,” Mr. Sondland

wrote.

The “anti-corruption statement” would have

announced an investigation into Burisma, the

Ukrainian natural gas company on whose

board Hunter Biden once sat. Mr. Sondland said

in the letter that he believed freezing the mil-

itary aid was “ill-advised,” and he wasn’t sure

who exactly in the administration had frozen it,

but assumed it was meant to press Ukraine into

the investigation.

Mr. Sondland’s letter comes after two other

U.S. officials, diplomat Bill Taylor and national

security council adviser Tim Morrison, ap-

peared to contradict his earlier testimony in

their own congressional depositions. Mr. Taylor

and Mr. Morrison said that Mr. Sondland had

told them the military aid was being held back

to get Ukraine to start an investigation.

Mr. Sondland wrote this week that reading

Mr. Taylor’s and Mr. Morrison’s testimony had

“refreshed my recollection” and “I now do re-

call” that he had in fact said the freezing of the

funds was connected to Mr. Trump’s demand

for an investigation.

Stephanie Grisham, the White House press

secretary, dismissed Mr. Sondland’s submis-

sion, saying in a statement that he “cannot

identify any solid source” for his assertion that

the aid was tied to the investigation demand.

“No amount of salacious media-biased head-

lines, which are clearly designed to influence

the narrative, change the fact that the President

has done nothing wrong,” she said.

Transcripts of text messages and testimony

from other U.S. officials, also released on Tues-

day, provided more detail on how U.S. diplo-

mats and Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal

lawyer, pressed Ukraine to probe Mr. Biden.

At one point, Mr. Zelensky agreed to give a

broad statement promising to investigate cor-

ruption. Mr. Yermak showed the proposed

statement to Kurt Volker, Mr. Trump’s point-

man on Ukraine’s fight against Russian-backed

insurgents. Mr. Volker edited it to add an expli-

cit reference to probing Burisma, the text mess-

ages showed.

The Ukrainians were uneasy with the

change, but Mr. Giuliani insisted on it, Mr. Volk-

er testified. As a result, Mr. Zelensky never made

the announcement.

Another text exchange, from May, showed

that some officials were already uncomfortable

with Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to go after Mr. Biden in

Ukraine. “Can anyone hope to succeed with the

Giuliani-Biden issue swirling for the next 18

months?” Mr. Taylor wrote to Mr. Volker, confid-

ing his fears in taking up a diplomatic posting in

Ukraine.

Tuesday’s disclosures werethe secondwave

of releases from the impeachment inquiry. On

Monday, the committee made public the testi-

mony of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. am-

bassador to Ukraine, and Michael McKinley, an

ex-adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In the midst of a campaign against her by Mr.

Giuliani, Ms. Yovanovitch said, Mr. Sondland

advised her to praise Mr. Trump on Twitter to

ingratiate herself with him. “You need to go big

or go home. You need to ... tweet out there that

you support the President,” she testified that

Mr. Sondland told her. Mr. Sondland testified

that he did not remember saying this.

Mr. McKinley, for his part, said he resigned

because he was “deeply disturbed ... that for-

eign governments were being approached to

procure negative information on political

opponents.”

U.S.AmbassadortotheEuropeanUnionGordonSondland,seeninWashingtonlastmonth,sayshe

believedfreezingmilitaryaidtoUkrainewas‘ill-advised.’SIPHIWE SIBEKO/REUTERS

Sondland:U.S.ambassadortoEUcannot

name‘anysolidsource,’presssecretarysays

FROMA

M

ore presidents have had
affairs in the White
House than have been
impeached. More presidents
have died in office of natural
causes than have been im-
peached. In fact, more presidents
have secretly, and probably ille-
gally, taped their Oval Office con-
versations than have been im-
peached.
Americans don’t do impeach-
ment often. They do it reluctant-
ly, they do it selectively, they do
it carefully. But above all, they do
it rarely.
American presidents have
done unwise and immoral things
before and yet they were not im-
peached.
Ronald Reagan survived the
Iran-Contra affair of 1986, with a
surfeit of illegality, without being
impeached. George W. Bush un-
dertook a war in Iraq in 2003, on
false information if not outright
false pretenses, without being
impeached. No one contemplat-
ed impeachment when James
Polk took the United States to
war, probably illegally, against
Mexico in 1846. Representative
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois
asked penetrating questions on
the floor of the House of Repre-
sentatives about Mr. Polk’s deci-
sion, but the word impeachment
did not pass his lips. Nor did any-
one speak seriously of impeach-
ment when Mr. Lincoln, as presi-
dent during the Civil War, tram-
pled civil liberties and suspend-
ed the writ of habeas corpus.
All of which is why the specta-
cle now unfolding in the U.S. cap-
ital is so remarkable.
As Donald Trump and his sup-
porters have argued – and will ar-
gue repeatedly as the procedure
unfolds – a country that selects
its leaders as an expression of
the will of the people is chary of
undoing the people’s choice.
Presidential impeachment – it
has been undertaken three times
in the 2^1 ⁄ 2 centuries since the
country declared independence
from Great Britain, where the no-
tion of impeachment originated
in the 14th century – is borne of
frustration, anger and outrage.
But it also creates new sources
of frustration, anger and outrage.
The fact that Americans are
divided over whether the coun-
try should proceed with im-
peachment is both cause and re-
sult of that frustration, anger and
outrage. This month’s Wall Street
Journal/NBC News poll found
that 49 per cent of those sur-
veyed believe that Mr. Trump
should be removed from office,
with 46 per cent saying he
should not be removed, a mea-
sure of that deep divide.
Indeed, presidential impeach-
ment – it has only occurred
twice, for Andrew Johnson
(1868) and Bill Clinton (1998),
and both were acquitted in the
Senate – is the ultimate Ameri-
can condemnation, the political
equivalent of the colonial Puri-
tan procedure of putting a
wrongdoer through the mortify-
ing ordeal of being placed in the
stocks in the public square of a
New England town.
But the Trump impeachment
vote – it likely will come this
month and is almost certain to
pass the House of Representa-
tives and send the matter to the
Senate for a trial – is different
from the two contemporary an-

tecedents: the 1974 near-im-

peachment of Richard Nixon,

who resigned, and the impeach-

ment of Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Trump’s impeachment is

centred in his alleged actions

with another country, a specific

impetus for the American found-

ing fathers’ 18th-century decision

to include impeachment in the

Constitution. It will have been

prompted by the President’s tele-

phone call to Ukrainian Presi-

dent Volodymyr Zelensky and

his alleged withholding of U.S.

military aid unless the country’s

new leader agreed to undertake

an investigation of the affairs of

the son of former vice-president

Joe Biden, now a Democratic

presidential candidate.

“Today, unlike in 1998, the

abuse in public trust is directly

tied to the President’s conduct of

America’s foreign affairs,” Paul

Rosenzweig, senior counsel to

Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater in-

vestigation of Mr. Clinton and

deputy assistant secretary of

homeland security for George W.

Bush, contended this week in a

Los Angeles Times op-ed co-

lumn. He argued, moreover, that

the Nixon and Clinton impeach-

ment efforts were fuelled by the

presidents’ efforts to produce

cover up as much as by their ac-

tions themselves.

This is not the case in the

Trump situation. “Sadly,” he ar-

gued, “we have now reached a

case where a president’s official

use of authority is what’s in

question.”

Another difference: This im-

peachment is being conducted

only two decades after the last

impeachment. The distance be-

tween the Johnson and Nixon

impeachments was more than a

century, which made for a sense

of unfamiliarity and drama that

this undertaking lacks. Ameri-

cans now are far more familiar,

and thus less intimidated today

with the process, which has oc-

curred two times since the To-

ronto Maple Leafs last won the

Stanley Cup.

Mr. Trump’s political profile

also sets this effort apart – and it

almost certainly will be central

to his defenders’ argument.

Unlike Mr. Nixon, who was a

member of the House of Repre-

sentatives and the Senate before

being vice-president for eight

years, and Mr. Clinton, who

served a dozen years asgovernor

of Arkansas, Mr. Trump now oc-

cupies his first political position.

Both impeachment drives oc-

curred in their second terms – in-

deed in their sixth years in the

White House – when the limits of

their powers should have been

far better known to them than to

Mr. Trump, who is in only the

third year of his first term.

Thus this will allow Republi-

cans to argue that the President

is inexperienced and showed

poor judgment, but did not

break the law – and as a result

should not be impeached and re-

moved.

Another element of the GOP

anti-impeachment playbook al-

most certainly will be to appeal

to Americans’ collective exasper-

ation over Mr. Trump’s actions

and behaviour – the notion, as

Napoleon Bonaparte said of the

French politician and diplomat

Talleyrand, that he “never knew

anyone so entirely indifferent to

right and wrong.”

That may be the greatest irony

of all, because that collective

public exasperation – and its

handmaiden, the fact that, ac-

cording to a separate query in

the Journal/NBC News Poll, for

the first time in 15 years Amer-

icans are equally impatient with

both parties – was produced in

large measure by the man who

today is seeking to evade im-

peachment itself.

Special to The Globe and Mail

Impeachmentisthe

ultimateAmerican

condemnation

Themovehasonly

occurredthreetimes

inU.S.historyand

that’swhythe

spectacleunfolding

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DAVIDSHRIBMAN

ANALYSIS

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