Sondland said he communicated to a leading Ukrainian official that “the resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine took some kind of action on the public statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.” He testified that he told Vice President Mike Pence that he believed the aid was being held up pending investigations, and Pence just nodded. (Pence’s chief of staff denied this.) Sondland didn’t substantially dispute the closed-door testimony of David Holmes, a senior U.S. Embassy official in Ukraine, who said he overheard a call to Trump that Sondland made on his cellphone. According to Holmes, on the call, made the day after the July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Zelensky for a “favor,” Trump asked Sondland if the Ukrainians were in fact going to pursue investigations. Sondland replied that they’d do whatever the president wanted.

After the call, Holmes testified, Sondland told him that Trump “did not give a [expletive] about Ukraine,” and cared only about what Sondland called “big stuff” that benefits the president. About that call, Sondland testified, “I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations, particularly given what we were hearing from Mr. Giuliani.”

Further, Sondland testified that Trump didn’t necessarily care about investigations per se, only the public announcement of investigations. Zelensky “had to announce the investigations, he didn’t actually have to do them,” he said. The public announcement, of course, would be sufficient to give Trump material to defame Biden and muddy the waters about Russia’s help in getting Trump elected in the first place.

Speaking of Russia’s role in 2016: A few Republicans have tried to massage Trump’s claims of Ukrainian election interference to make them sound marginally less insane. At Wednesday’s hearing, Nunes accused Ukraine of meddling in America’s election largely through public statements by Ukrainian officials. Among these statements was a 2016 op-ed essay by Valeriy Chaly, then the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, objecting to Trump’s statement that as president he’d consider recognizing Russian-occupied Crimea as Russian, rather than Ukrainian, territory.

Leave aside that there is nothing illicit about public officials expressing their opinions about matters of urgent concern to their own countries. Sondland’s testimony made it plain that such public comments are not what Trump had in mind in calling for investigations into what Ukraine did in 2016. Trump wanted an inquiry into the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the D.N.C., which is why Sondland repeatedly spoke about proposed investigations involving the “D.N.C. server.” He wanted Ukraine’s help exonerating Russia for its attack on America.

Sondland is not a wholly reliable witness; his insistence that he was ignorant of the connection between Burisma and the Bidens when he pressed Ukraine for investigations is hardly credible. (Volker made the same preposterous claim on Tuesday — both men were likely trying to distance themselves from one of the ugliest aspects of Trump’s shakedown.) Republicans will likely cling to the fact that Sondland said he never heard directly from Trump about a linkage between security aid to Ukraine and investigations; Sondland said he put it together because, as he repeated several times, “two plus two equals four.”