Taylor staffer Holmes' opening statement revealed

CNN has a copy.

Excerpts:

Zelensky is going to love that revelation.

That's going to bring Ambassador Taylor's testimony into question.  Taylor said at his public hearing that he had only just heard from Holmes about that lunch and Sondland's phone call to Trump.  I wondered at the time why Holmes had not told him sooner.  This makes more sense, but puts Taylor in a hot spot.  That's unfortunate, to say the least.  Republicans are going to be able to say everybody's lying, hiding things, to try to make the president look bad.  A big misstep by Taylor.

What the hell does the attorney general of the United States have to do with foreign policy?

In this next excerpt, Holmes cleans up for Taylor, but I think Taylor will still get raked.

In Taylor's public testimony, he should have said Holmes had just reminded him of a phone call that Taylor had forgotten.

Taylor's statement:

It appears that this was an unauthorized leak of the statement.  It looks like somebody hastily photographed it, doing so surreptitiously by placing it on the floor.  It looks like carpet underneath it.

"We always learn more when witnesses come in, and today we learned a lot more," Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said Friday night as he left the closed-door deposition. "The arrows continue to point in the direction of a shakedown scheme, led by the president of the United States [and] operated by agents like Rudy Giuliani, Gordon Sondland and Mick Mulvaney," he continued.

[...]

Holmes, the counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, is one of Taylor's top staffers in Kyiv.

  The Hill

And now Holmes undermines a central claim in Sondland’s testimony: That Sondland didn’t know that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s interest in investigating a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had anything to do with the Biden family.

[...]

“But I did not understand, until much later,” Sondland said as of late May, “that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.”

[...]

Sondland explained in his testimony that he hadn’t read the news coverage, even though aides compiled it for him and he was focused on Ukraine policy during this time.

Holmes’s testimony quotes Sondland explicitly referring to this as the “Biden investigation” in July, which suggests there was a reason the ambassador’s testimony didn’t make sense. Sondland will testify alongside others on Wednesday, and his hot seat just got significantly hotter.

  WaPo

Sondland is up to his neck in lies and corruption.

Holmes says Taylor told him that on a June 28 call he had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “three amigos” — Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — “it was made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”

This call, notably, was not part of Taylor’s own testimony, though Taylor quickly came to believe that such a meeting was indeed conditioned on Ukraine launching such an investigation.

More problems with Taylor. Slight but still problems. Perhaps he's old enough to be forgetful. I know I would be.

Taylor testified that on the June 28 call, before Zelensky was added to the line, Sondland said he didn’t want interagency officials on the call, because “he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelensky to the call.”

Sondland's Wednesday hearing is goig to be lit.

It’s worth noting that, despite early GOP attempts to portray Holmes as a partisan — on Friday they promoted a photo of him shaking hands with Barack Obama — he won an award in 2014 after raising concerns about Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Holmes, who served in Afghanistan, was awarded for his “constructive dissent.”

Holmes doesn’t directly say that his testimony contradicts the GOP’s arguments, but it’s certainly suggested. And it makes his full deposition, which we have yet to see, worth paying close attention to.

Also, there's another closed door hearing being held today.

A longtime career employee at the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to break ranks and testify Saturday in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, potentially filling in important details on the holdup of military aid to Ukraine.

Mark Sandy would be the first OMB employee to testify in the inquiry, after OMB acting director Russell T. Vought and two other political appointees at the agency defied congressional subpoenas to appear. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and ordered administration officials not to participate.

  WaPo

Which is totally outrageous. Unconstitutional? Do they not understand the Constitution?

Unlike these other OMB officials, Sandy is a career employee, not one appointed by the president. He has worked at the agency off and on for over a decade, under presidents of both parties, climbing the ranks to his current role as deputy associate director for national security programs.

He'll be getting the boot.

Typically, witnesses in the impeachment inquiry have been served with subpoenas immediately before their depositions are scheduled to begin, an approach Democrats say is designed to give them cover against an administration that has ordered officials not to comply with the inquiry.

[...]

“If he is subpoenaed, he will appear,” Sandy’s lawyer, Barbara “Biz” Van Gelder, said Thursday evening.

[...]

Sandy could provide insight into the process by which some $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine was held up over the summer. He was among the career staffers who raised questions about the holdup on the aid, people familiar with the matter said, and his role gave him responsibility for signing the documents required to hold it up.

So we're going to at least find out who ordered him to sign them.

Sandy’s signature appears on at least one of these so-called apportionment letters in July that prevented the money from going to Ukraine, according to copies of the documents discussed during an earlier deposition in the impeachment inquiry, a transcript of which was made public. But after that, the process for approving or denying such funds was taken over by a political appointee at OMB, Michael Duffey, who defied a congressional subpoena to testify earlier this month.

All those people who defy Congress should, in the end, pay some price for it. Otherwise, Congressional power is a farce and we might as well admit we're an authoritarian state.

Dude, could you not have laid it out flat and photographed it?

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

It’s also faintly hilarious that the whole case may be broken because two old men talked too loudly on their cellphones.

  Charles P Pierce

UPDATE:

Holmes transcript