Schiff has kept this buried
Based on the testimony from Sondland and other witnesses, the final report from the House Intelligence Committee concluded last week that Sondland made this offer of a quid pro quo clear to Yermak that day in Warsaw. “Following this meeting, Ambassador Sondland pulled aside President Zelensky’s advisor, Mr. Yermak, to explain that the hold on security assistance was conditioned on the public announcement of the Burisma/Biden and the 2016 election interference investigations,” the report states.
Yermak disputes this. “Gordon and I were never alone together,” he said when TIME asked about the Warsaw meeting. “We bumped into each other in the hallway next to the escalator, as I was walking out.” He recalls that several members of the American and Ukrainian delegations were also nearby, as well as bodyguards and hotel staff, though he was not sure whether any of them heard his brief conversation with Sondland. “And I remember – everything is fine with my memory – we talked about how well the meeting went. That’s all we talked about,” Yermak says.
These comments cast doubt on an important moment in the impeachment inquiry’s reconstruction of events: specifically, the only known point at which an American official directly tells the Ukrainians about the link between U.S. aid and the announcement of specific investigations.
In a statement, Sondland’s lawyer said “Ambassador Sondland stands by his prior testimony and will not comment further.” Yermak said no one from the congressional committees that are overseeing the impeachment inquiry have contacted him to seek his testimony, nor have any other U.S. officials.
In his initial testimony to the impeachment inquiry in October, Sondland said he never knew the U.S. aid to Ukraine was conditional on the investigations Trump wanted. But the following month, Sondland amended his testimony with a new sworn statement, in which he described the conversation with Yermak in Warsaw. “I now recall speaking individually with Mr. Yermak, where I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland wrote in the amended testimony.
The rest is at Time