During the first break in Wednesday’s impeachment hearings—which featured U.S. Ambassador to the EU and million-dollar Trump donor Gordon Sondland implicating President Donald Trump in a quid pro quo with Ukraine—Fox News anchor Chris Wallace declared that Sondland “took out the bus and ran it over” President Donald Trump and a number of his allies and aides.
“I think what Gordon Sondland was trying to do here is protect himself more than he is to protect anybody else,” Wallace said during Fox News’ special coverage.
“To a certain degree, he took out the bus and ran over President Trump, Vice President Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney,” he added. “He implicates all of them.”
Besides roundly trashing Trump and Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, throughout his testimony, Sondland also took aim at the State Department for not offering up any objection to Trumpworld’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to commit to investigations into the president’s political rivals.
“And one of the things, it pains [Sondland] to say, this wasn’t a rogue operation,” Wallace explained. “I wasn’t a freelancer. Everybody knew. Everybody was in the loop on this.”
While Wallace pointed out that Sondland relayed that Trump did not specifically tell him that military aid and a White House meeting were being held up in return for a public announcement of the investigations, “he certainly makes it clear that in the direct conversations he has with the president he saw a conditionality here.”
The Fox anchor’s remarks come on the heels of Fox News contributor Ken Starr suggesting that Republican senators might consider taking a trip to the White House to possibly discuss Trump’s resignation, à la Richard Nixon.