Pivotal testimony in the impeachment hearings

The American ambassador to the E.U. delivered blunt testimony that implicated President Trump and top U.S. officials — including the vice president, the secretary of state, the acting chief of staff and others — in the pressure campaign on Ukraine.

“Everyone,” the ambassador, Gordon Sondland, said, “was in the loop.” And he affirmed that there was a quid pro quo over Mr. Trump’s desire for investigations by Ukraine into his political rivals.

Mr. Sondland said he reluctantly worked with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to pressure Ukraine to publicly commit to investigating Joe Biden “at the express direction of the president.”

Response: Mr. Trump, reading from a notepad of talking points scrawled in Sharpie, seized on part of Mr. Sondland’s testimony in which he said that Mr. Trump did not explicitly tell him about conditions on a White House meeting coveted by Ukraine’s president or the release of security assistance to Kyiv.