an interim basis in Ukraine. He arrived in Kyiv on June 17.

Taylor testified that upon his arrival in Ukraine, the two channels of U.S. policymaking seemed largely aligned. One shared goal was to arrange the visit by Zelensky to the White House. But the alignment did not hold, and the “domestic political errand” began to clash with the traditional foreign policy process.

Conditions for a White House Meeting

This brings us to the third major element of the story: how a White House meeting the Ukrainians badly wanted came to be conditioned on Ukrainian willingness to announce highly political investigations.

Taylor testified concerning events surrounding a call between Zelensky and Sondland, Volker, Perry and Taylor—all dialing in from different locations. In a planning call the day before, Sondland told Taylor thatthe time. But on a July 19 call with Hill and Vindman, he learned that Sondland had, in a July 10 meeting with Ukrainian officials at the White House, explicitly connected “investigations” to the proposed White House visit. By that time, Taylor testified, it had become clear to him that a White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump was conditioned on the Ukrainian government’s investigating Burisma and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election.

That July 10 meeting was apparently quite a scene, with a fair amount of drama—though Sondland later testified that he did not recall the meeting as being as heated and contentious as the others did. It began in National Security Adviser John Bolton’s office in the White House and included Bolton, Hill, Perry, Volker, Sondland,