WASHINGTON — The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, testified Tuesday behind closed doors as part of House Democrats’ ongoing impeachment investigation.
According to an official working on the investigation, Taylor was issued a subpoena Tuesday morning by the House Intelligence Committee to compel his deposition in light of Trump administration efforts to block or limit his appearance.
Members of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees were expected to question him about text messages between him and two other American diplomats about the Trump administration’s policy toward Ukraine.
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After departing the closed-door deposition a few hours in, freshman Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., told reporters that Tuesday was his “most disturbing day in the Congress so far.”
“Very troubling,” Levin added, without elaborating further.
As part of text messages between Taylor, U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and the now-former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Taylor expressed concern about why U.S. military assistance for Ukraine was held up by the White House.
“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor texted Sondland on Sept. 9, according to text messages provided to Congress by Volker and released by the committees involved in the inquiry.
Democrats have pointed to the text exchange, a critical piece of the impeachment investigation, as part of burgeoning body of proof that there was a quid pro quo involved between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Trump held up the military aid in exchange for Ukraine agreeing to conduct probes that would be politically advantageous to Trump.
Taylor came out of retirement in June to serve as chargé d’affaires in Kyiv after Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post as ambassador to Ukraine in the spring.
Yovanovitch, Sondland and Volker are among the key witnesses who have already testified in the impeachment inquiry. The White House has vowed not to cooperate with what it called an invalid investigation, with the House exercising its subpoena powers in response.
Yovanovitch, a career diplomat, told impeachment investigators in a deposition that lasted more than 9 hours that Trump had personally pressured the State Department to remove her, even though a top department official assured her that she had “done nothing wrong.”
