We all sometimes hear the other side of conversations others are having, and of course a voice that sounded like his would grab attention.
Of more interest is that the call took place in the restaurant at all, but typical Sondland idiocy that's come back to bite him. Big, perjury time. This revelation came AFTER he "remembered" and was allowed to amend his testimony.
From the AP:
“Obviously, making a phone call from Kyiv to the president of the United States means that not just the Russian intelligence services will be on the call, but a whole lot of other people, too,” McFaul said. “If it was that important, he (Sondland) could have easily gotten up from the restaurant, gone to the embassy and made a secure call through the White House operations center.”
Steven Pifer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, said he always assumed his cellphone calls were being monitored and would not discuss anything sensitive unless he was on a secure phone at the embassy or his residence.
In a closed-door hearing last month, former White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill said she was concerned that Sondland posed a counterintelligence risk ... Hill cited a Sondland habit of giving out personal cellphone numbers — hers and national security adviser John Bolton’s as well as his own — and his failure to get appropriately briefed ahead of meetings.
“So he was often meeting with people he had no information about,” said Hill, who served as the senior director for Russia at the National Security Council. “It’s like basically driving along with no guardrails and no GPS on an unfamiliar territory.”
She said Sondland was meeting with foreign officials “that we had derogatory information on that he shouldn’t have been meeting with” or he was giving out his phone number or texting foreign officials. “All of those communications could have been exfiltrated by the Russians very easily,” she said.
Hill said officials from Europe would literally appear at the gates of the White House and call her personal phone, which was kept in a lockbox. She said she’d later find messages from irate officials who’d been told by Sondland that they were supposed to meet with her.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
