What did President Donald Trump know, and when did he know it? According to Gordon Sondland, he knew everything about the Ukraine scheme, and he knew it all along. The U.S. ambassador to the European Union confirmed the core allegations that ignited the impeachment inquiry: that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani tried to coerce the Ukrainian government into smearing Joe Biden earlier this year when it looked likely that Biden would be Trump’s 2020 opponent.

Sondland’s testimony came during a House Intelligence Committee hearing where Republicans had sought his appearance. That quickly turned out to be a strategic error. “Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelenskiy,” Sondland told the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. “Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election, DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

Sondland also made it clear that he knew Giuliani wasn’t freelancing. “Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States,” Sondland said in his opening statement. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders.”

From testimony offered by Sondland and others, the idea of a “regular channel” and an “irregular channel” for American diplomacy no longer seems like the best way to understand the Ukraine scheme. Instead, think of the key players as planets orbiting a star. Only some light could reach the whistleblower, who sat in the outermost orbit. Further inward were Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams, who listened in to the infamous July 25 phone call where Trump asked Zelenskiy for investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Then came career diplomats like George Kent and Bill Taylor. Even nearer to the light was Kurt Volker and Tim Morrison, while Gordon Sondland was closer still.

And at the center of this solar system was Trump himself—in Sondland’s telling, radiating his unmistakable desire for the Ukrainian government to meddle in American politics, with Giuliani conveying his message to others as a malign Mercury of sorts. It’s well established that Trump knows to not make his wishes explicit. He fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017 after cryptically asking him to pledge his loyalty and urging him to drop the Michael Flynn investigation. “That’s how he speaks,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime legal fixer, told Congress in February. “He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in code. And I understand the code because I’ve been around him for decades.”