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Trump Attacks Impeachment Inquiry and Accuses a Witness of Lying
Mr. Trump said a career diplomat made up a conversation between him and his ambassador to the European Union, dismissing a critical detail in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
WASHINGTON — President Trump unleashed a series of falsehoods on Friday in an effort to invalidate the impeachment inquiry and counter sworn testimony from officials in his own administration, after a week of damaging public hearings.
In a 53-minute phone interview with “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump accused David Holmes, a political counselor to the American ambassador in Ukraine, of fabricating a phone call between Mr. Trump and the American ambassador to the European Union. Mr. Holmes told impeachment investigators that he had overheard the president ask the ambassador, Gordon D. Sondland, about Ukrainian investigations into his political rivals, a consequential detail in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
“I guarantee you that never took place,” Mr. Trump said. He added that he barely knew Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier from Oregon who contributed $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee. In his own testimony, Mr. Sondland corroborated Mr. Holmes’s account.
The interview on Friday, broadcast live and commercial-free with a view of the “Fox & Friends” hosts speaking by phone to Mr. Trump, gave the president a chance to respond to the damaging revelations of the past week and reprise widely debunked theories and some of his favorite lines of attack.
To start, Mr. Trump called Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, a “sick puppy,” a “corrupt politician” and the first witness he would want to call in a Senate impeachment trial.
Will he be impeached? “I don’t expect it,” the president said. “I think it’s very hard for them to impeach you when they have absolutely nothing.” Some of Mr. Trump’s top aides and legal advisers, anticipating that the Democratic-led House would impeach Mr. Trump, met with Republican senators on Thursday to strategize over what they would do.
Mr. Trump also said he knows the identity of the anonymous whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry — and asserted that the details in the complaint were “fake.”
The July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was “perfect.” He said, “Why should we give money to a country that’s known corrupt?”
Mr. Trump also said the Obama administration spied on his campaign, an accusation leveled without evidence on Twitter in the early days of his administration. “They tried to overthrow the presidency. This is a disgrace.”
He also said Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Hillary Clinton, an unsubstantiated theory. “Don’t forget. Ukraine hated me. They were after me in the election.”
“This guy, Sondland: hardly know him,” Mr. Trump said.
“I’ve had a couple of conversations with him,” Mr. Trump said. “I see him hanging around when I go to Europe.”
Mr. Sondland is posted in Brussels and testified that he had spoken to the president on the phone some 20 times.
Mr. Holmes in public testimony on Thursday described in detail the phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sondland during a lunch with two other officials from the State Department, as they dined outdoors at a Kyiv restaurant and shared a bottle of wine.
Mr. Holmes said Mr. Sondland and Mr. Trump were discussing a recent meeting with Mr. Zelensky, just one day after the phone call between the leaders, which is at the heart of the impeachment investigation.
According to Mr. Holmes, the president asked Mr. Sondland if Mr. Zelensky would pursue the investigations he sought into Democrats. Mr. Sondland assured Mr. Trump that “he’s going to do it,” and that the Ukrainian leader would do “anything you ask him to.” When the call ended, Mr. Holmes said the ambassador told him Mr. Trump did not care about Ukraine, only about “big things” like the investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.
A day before Mr. Holmes’s testimony, Mr. Sondland publicly implicated the president and other senior administration officials in the pressure campaign against Ukraine.
In the Fox interview, Mr. Trump hit on a theme that Democrats and witnesses have raised during the impeachment hearings — how was it that Mr. Sondland, with no foreign policy experience and who was not the ambassador to Ukraine, found himself leading the United States policy with Ukraine?
“But he was really the European Union ambassador, and all of a sudden he’s working on this,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Ask about that.”
Mr. Sondland told lawmakers that Mr. Trump directed him to do so.
Noah Weiland contributed reporting.
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