Sondland Kept Pompeo Informed on Ukraine Pressure Campaign
WASHINGTON — Gordon D. Sondland, the diplomat at the center of the House impeachment inquiry, kept Secretary of State Mike Pompeo apprised of key developments in the campaign to pressure Ukraine’s leader into public commitments that would satisfy President Trump, two people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Sondland informed Mr. Pompeo in mid-August about a draft statement that Mr. Sondland and another American diplomat had worked on with the Ukrainians that they hoped would persuade Mr. Trump to grant Ukraine’s new president the Oval Office meeting he was seeking, the people said.
Later that month, Mr. Sondland discussed with Mr. Pompeo the possibility of pushing the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to pledge during a planned meeting with Mr. Trump in Warsaw that he would take the steps being sought by Mr. Trump as a way to break the logjam in relations between the two countries, the people said.
Mr. Pompeo expressed his approval of the plan, they said, but Mr. Trump later canceled his trip to Poland.
The disclosures link Mr. Pompeo more directly to the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. It is not clear how specific Mr. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, was in his communications with Mr. Pompeo about what was being asked of the Ukrainians.
But Mr. Pompeo was among those who had listened in on a call between the two leaders on July 25, when Mr. Trump explicitly asked Mr. Zelensky for investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and into a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. A lawyer for Mr. Pompeo declined to comment.
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