quote:At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early Septemberwith the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating.
The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, but he then went on to outline his preconditions for releasing the security assistance and granting a White House visit. The call was so alarming that when John Bolton learned of it, he ordered his’ deputy Tim Morrison to immediately report it to the National Security Council lawyers.
Sondland has testified there was a call on September 9th in which Trump said there was no quid pro quo, but that he wanted President Zelenskyy to do the right thing. A close reading of the publicly available evidence shows that the latter call was actually the very one that sent Morrison to the lawyers, and that Ambassador Bill Taylor foregrounded in his written deposition to inform Congress of the quid pro quo.