Key impeachment witness amends testimony to admit quid pro quo…or did he?

  Earlier today we learned that a key witness in the impeachment inquiry, Gordon Sondland, modified his previous statement to say there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine which made military funding contingent on corruption investigations. Here is more:

A critical witness in the impeachment inquiry offered Congress substantial new testimony this week, revealing that he told a top Ukrainian official that the country likely would not receive American military aid unless it publicly committed to investigations President Trump wanted.

Mr. Sondland’s testimony offered several major new details beyond the account he gave the inquiry in a 10-hour interview last month. He provided a more robust description of his own role in alerting the Ukrainians that they needed to go along with investigative requests being demanded by the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. By early September, Mr. Sondland said, he had become convinced that military aid and a White House meeting were conditioned on Ukraine committing to those investigations.

The additions Mr. Sondland made to his testimony were significant because they were the first admission by a senior figure who had direct contact with Mr. Trump that the military aid for Ukraine was being held hostage to the president’s demands for investigations into his political rivals.

 At least that is what the media is telling us and when you read the reports it sounds pretty damning, in fact I was prepared to write a post tonight speculating that this could be the beginning of the end of the Trump administration.

  But we know that not everything is as it seems when it comes to what the mainstream media reports and it turns out they might not be giving us the full story. Mark Meadows is claiming the reporting is misleading because it leaves out a key aspect in Sondland’s testimony, here is what he tweeted earlier today:

    Gordon Sondland was never told by the President the military funding was contingent on a corruption investigation into the corrupt Biden family, he just assumed on his own that it was and when he met with Ukrainian officials he acted as if he was told it was. I fail to see how this implicates Donald Trump, other than the fact that maybe he should have been more clear, but yet the media will continue push this as the smoking gun.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium