ATLANTA—Let us now praise famous lawyering. In the middle of his wonderful, damning opening statement, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and, at last, nobody’s huckleberry any more, made the point that, yes, he was in the middle of the scheme to shake down the government of Ukraine, and he’d like to talk more about that, but a lot of the details are in the documents that the administration* won’t release to the committee. It was a masterful flip of the script.

Of course, if, as Sondland most assuredly did, you have arrived in the Capitol to burn everything in that administration down, you need good lawyers, because, if you have to burn everything down, you’re going to get more than a little singed yourself.

Everybody was in the loop.

Sondland said that later in his opening statement, which is going to be one of those documents on display in the National Archives one day. The president*. The vice president. The Secretary of State. The acting White House chief of staff. Rudy Giuliani. Even Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin. Sondland wrapped every one of them in dynamite. They were all in on the shakedown, which, when you come right down to it, was not very complicated at all. All of those people wanted the Bidens investigated. All of those people (initially) tried to leverage a White House visit for the new Ukrainian president to get that. Later, they continued to shake that president down by withholding military aid that already had been approved by the Congress. All of them, wrapped in dynamite by Gordon Sondland: hotelier, bon vivant, and now a human detonator.

Sondland’s testimony proved this isn’t so complicated. Drew Angerer Getty Images

In the late 1970s, in Massachusetts, there were contracts to be let for the construction of the new University of Massachusetts complex, to be built at Columbia Point on the ocean in Dorchester. The contract was awarded to a consulting company called McKee-Berger-Mansueto. The deal stunk to high heaven almost from jump. In the state senate, a couple of enterprising souls named Joseph DiCarlo and Ronald MacKenzie opened up an investigation and, because Massachusetts, they put the findings of that investigation up for bids. They also roped in James Kelly, the Senate president, who told the MBM officials that, for $100,000, all their problems with the legislature’s investigation would go away. Ultimately, all of this came to light, and a whole bunch of people went to jail.

The point of bringing this up is to point out that, while there was a great mass of evidence, that didn’t make the scandal itself hard to understand. Crooked legislators extorted money from a consulting company in order to fix an investigation into a dubious sweetheart contract. Everyone understood that.

That is where we find ourselves at the moment. There is now an almost limitless vista of clear evidence that the administration* was extorting a bribe from Ukraine so as to benefit itself in the 2020 election, and there is obviously more evidence coming. But the scandal itself is not complicated at all, and Sondland’s testimony, if it did nothing else, clarified that point for good and all. Anybody who pronounces this scandal as too complicated does so because that person wants it to be complicated.

‘Was there a quid pro quo? The answer is yes’.

“We followed the president’s orders...Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president … and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

"Everybody was in the loop."

There is nothing more clear and damning than that. Imagine what it would have been like if Gordon Sondland were “a note-taker."

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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