Gordon Sondland background

The political cauldron of impeachment is an unlikely landing point for a wealthy hotelier little known until recently outside the Northwest. But Sondland courted influence for years on a smaller stage in Oregon. He used contributions and connections to cozy up to politicians and jump lines of authority as he appears to have done for Trump in Ukraine, which is not a member of the 28-nation EU and therefore is outside his territory.

Sondland, 62, grew up in Seattle, the son of Jewish parents who married in Germany when his mother was 15 and fled the Holocaust. The family ran a dry-cleaning business, living in an upscale neighborhood where Sondland lacked the means of many of his schoolmates.

He studied at the University of Washington and later worked as a real estate broker. In 1985, he assembled an investment group that bought an old hotel.

Now the Hotel Theodore, the chic hotel is one of 14 properties owned by Provenance Hotels, which Sondland and his wife, Katherine Durant, built into a boutique chain that continues expanding. The couple have a family philanthropic foundation that’s given millions of dollars to organizations for the arts, homeless people and other causes.

In 2008, the foundation gave $1 million for a fund that continues to provide free admission to the Portland Art Museum for children 17 and younger.

Sondland has donated heavily to Republican political candidates, but he has also crossed party lines, serving in 2002 on the transition team for Oregon Democratic Gov.-elect Ted Kulongoski.

Once in office, Kulongoski appointed him to head the Oregon Film board.

[...]

Sondland stood out at Portland receptions, hobnobbing in the orbit of elected officials and maneuvering to appear in photographs with them. He boasted of working behind the scenes to foster ties between Kulongoski and then-President George W. Bush, saying that he helped the governor get federal money for projects.

In a 2016 interview, he portrayed himself as a master of the quid pro quo, the practice he would later deny in his text concerning the Ukraine matter. “We would make these requests and they were done quietly,” he told the Portland Business Journal.

“They were done with rifle precision and there was always a quid pro quo,” Sondland said in the interview. “The governor would help the president with something, and the president would help the governor with something. And it was very transactional.”

  LA Times

I bet that's going to come up in his hearing.

Anna Richter Taylor, who was Kulongoski’s spokeswoman at the time, disputes his account.

“If the governor needed to speak with the president or someone in the White House, he didn’t need an outside party to facilitate it,” she said.

He might want to use that, and say he was exaggerating his position.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.