82 Time December 23–30, 2019
red wine as the group shared a dish of Ukrai-
nian dumplings. Sondland kept looking at his
watch. At 6:30 a.m., D.C. time, he reached
for his phone, tapped its screen and said,
“ Gordon Sondland, calling for the President.”
When the President came on, Sondland
said, in a big, booming voice, “Good morning,
Mr. President.” Sondland winced and held
the phone as the President responded equally
loudly. “So, he’s going to do the investiga-
tions?” Trump said. “Oh, yeah, he’s going to
do it,” Sondland responded. “He’ll do anything
you ask him to do.” Across the table, Holmes
took out his own phone and began to tap out
notes on the conversation.
After hanging up, Sondland declared to the
table that Trump “did not give a sh-t about
Ukraine,” but only about “big stuff ” like “the
Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was push-
ing,” Holmes later testified. Holmes told his
supervisor later that day about what he had
overheard. Inside the embassy word began to
spread: the President was pressing for a Biden
investigation before he would help the new
Ukrainian government.
and the UkraInIans were growing desper-
ate. Since 2014, when Russia invaded and ille-
gally annexed the peninsula of Crimea, more
than 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in Eu-
rope’s only active war. Kyiv had come to rely on
the roughly $1.5 billion in security assistance
and military aid and equipment provided by
the U.S. since the start of the war. The support
had evolved from armored vehicles, night vi-
sion and radar equipment under President
Barack Obama to grenade launchers and anti-
tank missiles under Trump.
Zelensky raised the issue during the
July 25 call, and his exchange with Trump
had been pleasant. But across the river at
the Pentagon that day, in the office in charge
of Ukraine policy, led by 20-year civil ser-
vant Laura Cooper, they were fielding con-
cerned emails. Ukrainian officials wanted
to know why military aid approved by Con-
gress had been frozen. Zelensky took these
concerns all the way up to Pence roughly
six weeks later during a meeting in Warsaw.
“We honestly said, ‘O.K., that’s bad. What’s
going on here?’ ” recalls Andriy Yermak, the ad-
viser Zelensky entrusted to deal with the Amer-
icans. “We were told that they would figure it
out,” Yermak says. But no one at either the State
or Defense Departments could provide clarity.
The answer lay inside the keeper of the
federal government’s purse strings, the OMB.
While top political appointees get fancy offices
like Hill’s across from the West Wing, many
civil servants, including those in OMB’s Na-
tional Security Division, are up the street in
a hulking ’60s-era brick and glass New Exec-
utive Office Building. The drab accommoda-
tions belie the high-stakes work that happens
there: moving the money that pays for the en-
tirety of the $700 billion U.S. military, parcel-
ing out black-budget dollars for covert oper-
ations and funding numerous lower-profile
programs, including military aid to Ukraine.
The division is headed by Mark Sandy, a grad-
uate of Oxford and the Naval War College, 21-
year Navy reservist and veteran of a tour of
duty in Afghanistan.
On July 18, a Trump political appointee in-
formed Sandy that the President had put a hold
on nearly $400 million in aid that Congress
had committed to providing Ukraine in fiscal
year 2019. When he asked why, Sandy couldn’t
get an answer, but word from higher-ups was
that the order came from the President himself.
OMB officials pride themselves on nonparti-
sanship, and Sandy’s division set about mak-
ing the directive happen.
The first challenge was that Pentagon
lawyers said holding up the aid could be le-
gally problematic. Congress required that the
money be spent before the end of September,
and the process of getting it out the door could
take many weeks. Sandy found a way to stall
for time by adding a footnote to the spending
order that temporarily paused payment. He
explained the need for the workaround to his
chain of command, signaling that there couldWILLIAM TAYLOR
Chargé d’affaires
A 50-year public servant
and backer of Ukraine
in its war with Russia,
Taylor worried that more
Ukrainians would die
without the military aid that
Trump had blocked.(^2019) GUARDIANS OF THE YEAR