Under questioning from lawmakers, Sondland suggested that as Cabinet members, Mulvaney and Pompeo were perhaps better informed about the president’s wishes than was Sondland himself. “A lot of people were aware of it,” he told House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff. “I didn’t know that the aid was conclusively tied [up]. I was presuming. [Mulvaney] was in a position to say yes it was or no it wasn’t.” And as Schiff noted, Mulvaney already admitted that the administration decided to hold the aid hostage—in public, actually, during a press conference last month. (He later walked it back.)
Pompeo declined to answer questions about Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday, telling reporters that he was “working” and “in meetings” therefore “didn’t see a single thing today.” A State Department spokesperson, however, denied that Sondland told the Secretary of State that Trump was “linking aid to investigations of political opponents,” according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, a Pence spokesperson asserted that the alleged Pence-Sondland conversation in Poland “never happened.” Of course, this is not the same as Pence saying so under oath.
The allegation that multiple Cabinet members knew of or were complicit in this diplomatic shakedown is a serious one, and the simplest way to test it would be to hear from the implicated individuals themselves. The Trump White House, however, has prevented that from taking place: As Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman noted, Perry and Mulvaney have refused to testify, as has Perry’s former chief of staff, Brian McCormack, and a top Mulvaney aide, Robert Blair. Bolton has expressed a willingness to participate, but only if a court orders him to do so. “Would you include them, as well as Secretary Pompeo, as key witnesses that would be able to provide some additional information?” Goldman asked. “I think they would,” Sondland answered.
Similarly, Sondland blamed his occasionally-spotty recollections on the State Department barring him from accessing many of his official files. As a self-described non-notetaker, he said, such access “would have been very helpful to me in trying to reconstruct with whom I spoke and met, when, and what was said.” When confirming the details of a certain phone call, he pointedly stated that he could do so only because the White House “finally shared certain call dates and times with my attorneys.” Sondland added there are still documents he hasn’t been able to obtain from the State Department, functionally stopping him from providing as much information as he otherwise could.