InfoSearched
Two witnesses take the mic Thursday to fill in the blanks on the “drug deal” and the “loves your ass” call.
Day 5 of the House Intelligence Committee’s public impeachment hearings brings a pair of witnesses who were in the room — or on the phone — for some of the most quoted moments of the entire inquiry. Fiona Hill, the former top Russia adviser on the National Security Council, and David Holmes, a political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, are scheduled to testify together on Thursday, November 21, 2019, closing out a week that has already featured Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Kurt Volker and Tim Morrison.
Hill left the NSC in July 2019 after clashing internally over how Ukraine policy was being handled outside normal channels. Holmes overheard a call few people were ever supposed to hear. Together, their accounts connect the July 10 West Wing meeting to the July 26 phone call that put Ukraine’s president on speakerphone with Donald Trump.
- Fiona Hill and David Holmes are set to testify publicly together on Thursday, November 21, 2019 — the fifth day of open impeachment hearings.
- Hill has described a July 10 White House meeting where John Bolton cut off Gordon Sondland after he tied a Trump-Zelensky meeting to investigations, telling Hill to inform NSC lawyer John Eisenberg he wouldn’t be “part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.”
- Holmes overheard Trump ask Sondland by phone on July 26 whether Zelensky was “going to do the investigation,” with Sondland replying that Zelensky “loves your ass” and would do “anything you ask him to.”
Fiona Hill’s Account of the July 10 Meeting
Hill served as Senior Director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council until July 2019, working directly under John Bolton. In her closed-door deposition, she laid out how Rudy Giuliani, Sondland and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney were running a Ukraine channel separate from the NSC’s normal process. The centerpiece of her account is a meeting on July 10, 2019, when Ukrainian officials visited the White House.
According to Hill’s deposition, Sondland told the visiting Ukrainians that a White House meeting between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky was contingent on Ukraine launching investigations. Bolton reportedly ended the conversation on the spot and later instructed Hill to flag the exchange to Eisenberg, the NSC’s legal counsel, using the now-famous phrase about a “drug deal” being cooked up by Sondland and Mulvaney.
David Holmes and the Unsecure Call
Holmes, a career foreign service officer stationed at the embassy in Kyiv, becomes a public witness after disclosing that he personally overheard Trump’s July 26 phone call with Sondland — a call placed on an unsecure line at a restaurant, loud enough that Holmes says he could hear Trump’s voice without the phone on speaker.
Holmes has said Trump asked Sondland point-blank whether Zelensky was “going to do the investigation,” and that Sondland assured him Zelensky would. Holmes also told investigators that Sondland, after hanging up, explained that the president didn’t care about Ukraine policy broadly — only about the “big stuff” that affected him personally, naming the investigations into the Bidens and Burisma specifically.
Sondland told the president Zelensky “loves your ass” and would do “anything you ask him to.”
Context Within the Broader Case
The two witnesses arrive after four days of testimony that already put Sondland, Vindman, Volker and Morrison on record about the same events from different vantage points. Hill and Holmes give investigators a bookend: one describing the internal White House alarm bells in July, the other describing the phone call that allegedly confirmed what the money and the meeting were actually tied to. Democrats have moved at what they’ve called a fast-moving timeline toward drafting articles of impeachment, while Republicans on the committee continue to defend the president’s conduct. Some of that same partisan back-and-forth has spilled into other corners of Capitol Hill, including separate impeachment fights members of Congress have pushed elsewhere, and the Hunter Biden and Burisma questions Holmes says Sondland flagged have kept surfacing in ongoing coverage of the Biden family’s business dealings.
Thursday’s session is expected to run long, given that Hill and Holmes are testifying back-to-back rather than on separate days. Whether the committee gets Bolton himself in front of a microphone remains an open question — but for now, it’s Hill’s account of the “drug deal” phrase and Holmes’ account of a phone call overheard at a Kyiv restaurant that investigators are building the next stage of the inquiry around.
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