Impeachment Hearings: Watch David Holmes Full Opening Statement

The House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump heard Thursday David Holmes, a Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

Holmes said a “barrage” of allegations against then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch by Rudy Giuliani and others including Ukrainian officials “is unlike anything I have seen in my professional career.”

Holmes said envoy William Taylor described a June 28 call with Ukraine’s president on which it was “made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”

The embassy aide’s opening statement also described a June 26 phone call he overheard between Trump and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Afterward, Holmes said Sondland told him “that the President did not ‘give a s--tabout Ukraine.’”

Sondland said Trump cared about “‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.“ Sondland on Wednesday confirmed the broad outlines of the conversations, but said he didn’t remember mentioning Biden.

Holmes said that last April, as Trump’s private lawyer Rudy Giuliani began taking a direct role in Ukrainian diplomacy, at least one close aide to the incoming Ukrainian president thought Giuliani worked for Vice President Mike Pence.

Holmes said Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s campaign chairman, Ivan Bakanov, said he had been contacted by “someone named Giuliani who said he was an adviser to the vice president.”

The U.S. embassy aide also quoted diplomat Gordon Sondland as saying about Giuliani months later, “Dammit Rudy. Every time Rudy gets involved he goes and f---s everything up.”

Holmes also said that during an Aug. 27 meeting when then-National Security Advisor John Bolton was visiting Ukraine, he heard Bolton express frustration about Giuliani’s influence with Trump and also about diplomat Gordon Sondland’s “expansive” view of his mandate.

Bolton made clear that he couldn’t do anything about Giuliani’s role. The national security advisor recommended that Ukraine’s new prosecutor general open a channel with U.S. Attorney General William Barr instead of the informal channel that involved Giuliani.

Holmes said he could hear the call between diplomat Gordon Sondland and Trump at an outdoor restaurant terrace in Kyiv because the president spoke so loudly that Sondland “winced” at least twice and pulled the phone away from his ear.

Holmes reiterated that Sondland said the “Biden investigation” was what Trump was interested in, contradicting Sondland’s testimony a day earlier that he didn’t recall bringing Biden’s name into their conversation.

Holmes also discussed his general disbelief over the call.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my foreign service career,” he said of Sondland’s call with the president over a non-secure phone that even he could overhear, as well as the colorful language over a highly sensitive subject.

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