There are lots of private depositions this week in the secured room where the impeachment committees are meeting. While their testimony is private, their opening statements are not necessarily private, and some have been published in the media and commented on by politicians and pundits. So if you’re worried that anyone is leaking secret information to the press, they don’t seem to be. They’re pretty much sticking to public information.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending October 20…

General Happenings:

1. Trump says that Speaker Nancy Pelosi read the transcript Trump released and said, “this is not what the whistleblower said.” Pelosi says she never said that.
2. Trump says that Ukraine President Zelensky told him “out of the blue” that he didn’t like former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. In the transcript, Trump was the one who brought her up.
3. Democrats shoot down the idea of taking the impeachment inquiry to a full House vote because they think it would be playing right into Republicans’ hands. They’ll likely hold a full House vote when the depositions are over.
4. Rep. Adam Schiff says that the whistleblower might not testify because of concerns for his safety. With the release of the rough transcript of the call, though, that testimony might not be needed.
5. After this week’s testimony, impeachment investigators are looking into whether they need to question John Bolton.
6. Rick Perry says that Trump directed him to talk to Giuliani earlier this year. When they did talk, Giuliani blamed Ukraine for the Steele Dossier, said Ukraine has Hillary’s server, and accused Ukraine of helping put Paul Manafort in prison.

• • Can we just clear this up? The DNC doesn’t have a missing server. What we’re calling a server is actually an image on a cloud server that is hosted by some tech company. So it’s not missing, the FBI took an image of it, and there is no physical computer that someone could pick up and abscond with. There just isn’t.
  • Also, Rick Perry confirms he’ll resign. Trump will nominate Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette to take his place.

7. The White House opens an internal review into the call between Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky. We don’t know who called for the review or why.
8. Contradicting the administration’s stance that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says that we were withholding aid for Ukraine until they granted Trump’s request for investigations into the 2016 election (i.e., quid pro quo).

• • Mulvaney doesn’t mention Biden in his statement.
  • He does say it’s nothing unusual to pressure foreign government and it’s how politics gets done. He tells journalists to “get over it.”
  • Mulvaney later tries to walk his quid pro quo statement back and says the media misconstrued his statements, even though it’s all right there on video.
  • At the same time Mulvaney says there was quid pro quo, he also announces that the G-7 Summit next year will be held at Trump’s Doral resort in Miami. Critics start accusing Trump of self-dealing.
  • Mulvaney’s position is seen as extremely tenuous at this point, and Trump’s allies are looking at potential replacements, including Matt Whitaker and Chris Christie.

9. Mike Pence, Rick Perry, and the Office of Management and Budget refuse to cooperate with congressional requests for documents.
10. Representative Francis Rooney (FL) is the first House Republican to say he’d consider voting to impeach Trump. And then he announces he’s retiring.
11. State Department Counselor Ulrich Brechbuhl is scheduled to testify, but is later removed from the schedule.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

1. Two more men involved with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are arrested in the campaign finance fraud case. David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin are accused of conspiring with Parnas and Fruman to funnel funds to state and federal politicians.
2. Lev Parnas is one of Florida’s top supporters of Trump. Florida Senator Rick Scott was also a recipient of their illicit donations.
3. A grand jury subpoenas Representative Pete Sessions (R-TX) over his dealings with Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman.
4. Here are a few of Parnas and Fruman’s businesses:

• • Mafia Rave
  • Fraud Guarantee
  • Global Energy Producers (this appears to be the shell company funneling the political donations)

5. Russian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, whom the U.S. is trying to extradite and for whom Parnas has worked, tried to dig up dirt on Biden for Giuliani, hoping that it would help him avoid extradition.
6. Trump hasn’t been paying Giuliani for his services as personal attorney (and shadow foreign policy leader); however, Fraud Guarantee paid Giuliani $500,000.
7. Giuliani drops his lawyer because it’d be “silly to have a lawyer when I don’t need one.”
8. It turns out, though, that the investigation into Giuliani’s dealings with Parnas and Fruman also includes counterintelligence issues. Maybe he should rethink that lawyer thing.
9. Trump says he doesn’t know if Giuliani is still his attorney.

Fiona Hill Deposition:

1. Fiona Hill, a former senior official for Russia and Europe on the National Security Council, comes before the impeachment panel. She says:

• • Rudy Giuliani was running a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine to personally benefit Trump while sidestepping U.S. officials and diplomats. Giuliani wasn’t coordinating with the officials whose job it was to carry out U.S. foreign policy.
  • Hill confronted Gordon Sondland about what Giuliani was doing.
  • Former National Security Adviser John Bolton was furious over Giuliani’s activities, which were seen as politically motivated.
  • Bolton compared Giuliani to a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
  • Bolton met with Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, and Rick Perry in early July. At that point, Sondland let slip the conditions of releasing Ukraine’s military aid. Bolton told Hill he didn’t want to be part of any “drug deal” being cooked up on Ukraine. He encouraged Hill to take this to an NSC lawyer, which she did.
  • Giuliani says he wasn’t working a shadow policy and that Hill was just not in the loop, even though she worked very closely with Marie Yovanovitch and Gordon Sondland.
  • Hill was opposed to the removal of Yovanovitch.
  • Hill considered Sondland as a potential national security risk because he was so unprepared to take on his new job, which could easily be exploited. He also used his personal cellphone for official diplomatic business.

2. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), apparently not understanding how closed committee hearings work after all his time in Congress, tries to sit in on her deposition “as a member of Congress.” The parliamentarian forces Gaetz to leave the room, and now he gets to tell the story about how he got excluded from the deposition.
3. Republican push for the public release of transcripts of all depositions, which Schiff says they will eventually do. Schiff also says that some of the people who are deposed will return for open hearings.

George Kent Deposition:

1. The deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, George Kent, testifies before the impeachment panel despite being told by the State Department not to. He says:

• • In May, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney held a meeting to facilitate removing control of our relationship with Ukraine from people who had the most experience at the NSC and State Departments. He then handed over that control to the “three amigos”—Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
    • Mulvaney is the one who placed the aid to Ukraine on hold in the weeks before the phone call between the presidents.
    • Kent was told to lay low and focus on the other countries he was charged with, leaving Ukraine dealings to the three amigos.
    • This meeting occurred a few days after Marie Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.
  • Kent started to get suspicious last March that Yovanovitch was the target of a “classic disinformation campaign.” This is backed up by documents turned over to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general.
    • Giuliani got some of this disinformation from former Ukraine prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.
    • John Solomon, known for reporting on the conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s involvement in our elections, relied on some of that disinformation for his reporting. Solomon denies he participated in any disinformation campaign.
    • Kent points out that the “do not prosecute” list was an obvious phony, given the typos and misspellings that a career official would never make.
  • Kent was concerned about the undue influence a private attorney like Giuliani had in foreign policy.
  • Giuliani accused Kent of trying to protect the Bidens.
  • Giuliani asked the State Department and White House to grant a visa to Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Shokin is the person Joe Biden was working to oust because he wasn’t doing enough to fight or investigate corruption.
    • Shokin had promised Giuliani that he’d deliver dirt on Democrats.
  • Kent raised concerns in 2015 with Joe Biden’s staff about Hunter Biden serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, but the staffer turned him away.
    • Kent worried it would make it harder to show Ukrainians how to avoid conflicts of interest.
    • Joe Biden was also dealing with his other son, Beau, who was dying of cancer at the time (not an excuse, just for context).

Michael McKinley Deposition:

1. Michael McKinley, a top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, gives his deposition to the impeachment panel. He says:

• • He resigned last week out of frustration with the politicization fo the State Department.
  • He was particularly upset that control of Ukraine was removed from career diplomats, especially the removal of Marie Yovanovitch from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
  • Mike Pompeo should be standing up for and defending his State Department employees.
  • Trump’s administration was using the State Department to advance a “domestic political objective.”

Gordon Sondland Deposition:

1. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who the Trump administration blocked from appearing last week, gives his deposition. He says:

• • Trump outsourced U.S. policy on Ukraine to Giuliani, which made Sondland uncomfortable but he still carried out Trump’s wishes.
  • He didn’t know that Giuliani was looking for dirt on the Bidens, though Sondland has said several times publicly that this was exactly what Giuliani was doing.
  • When Sondland texted Bill Taylor to say there was no quid pro quo in withholding military aid to Ukraine, he was taking Trump at his word that there was no quid pro quo.
  • He didn’t know why military aid was delayed, who ordered it, or whether there was a quid pro quo.

2. Sondland contradicted Bolton in a meeting with Ukrainian officials at the White House when he said that Trump would meet with Zelensky on the condition that Zelensky open a corruption case. Bolton shut the meeting down.

• • But then, in a private meeting with Ukrainian officials following that, Sondland brought up Burisma with the Ukrainians. Bolton was present at that meeting, as well.
  • This all seems to indicate Sondland was well aware there was a quid pro quo going on.
  • This was the meeting that led Bolton to call the whole thing a drug deal.