At every turn these days, Gordon Sondland is described as “transactional,” governed by self-interest and one-upmanship.
So, let’s talk transactional.
I was introduced to the infamously transactional Republican in October 2010.
Long before Sondland bent a knee to Donald Trump, the Portland hotelier and his wife, Katherine Durant, were cashing in as landlords to a bunch of video poker bars on Hayden Island.
They were thinking about adding a “gentlemen’s club” to their business empire when the neighbors complained.
Part of my ensuing conversation with Sondland – nine years ago this month – has been quoted locally since the impeachment hearings provided Sondland the celebrity he has long craved.
But in the aftermath of his House testimony Thursday, I want to flesh out our exchange, especially given Sondland’s sudden concern for “collateral damage.”
A long-time Republican cash cow, Sondland bought himself an ambassadorship to the European Union when he donated $1 million – through four of his limited-liability companies – to Trump’s inaugural committee.
The national media had a good time last week with the naked ambition of the “diplomatic naïf.”
The Washington Post dredged up the 2016 Portland Business Journal “power breakfast,” where Sondland bragged that he secretly managed the give-and-take between the Bush White House and Ted Kulongoski, Oregon’s Democratic governor.
The projects “were done with rife precision,” Sondland claimed, “and there was always a quid pro quo. The governor would help the president with something, and the president would help the governor with something. And it was very transactional.”
The New York Times reported that Sondland was so clumsy at his vainglorious diplomacy that Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the White House, complained he was a national security risk.
As Sondland prepared to testify about Trump’s machinations in the Ukraine, the Times also noted that Sondland “now fears he will be blamed for the scandal, while more powerful players will be protected, one person close to him said.
“He has expressed concern that he could end up, the person said, as ‘collateral damage.’”
That line took me back to the fall of 2010 and Hayden Island.
When Sondland and Durant were looking for a new tenant for a 5,500-square foot hall vacated by the Newport Bay restaurant, a real-estate broker brought them a proposal from a strip joint.
Island homeowners were understandably alarmed. They could not believe Sondland, then president of the board at the Portland Art Museum, and Durant, a fixture on the Oregon Investment Council, would even consider such an offer.
Durant gave several of those homeowners an audience in her office at the Elizabeth Lofts. “She told us they’d be talking about a number of tenants,” Kent Craford told me at the time, “but this was one of the most lucrative and it would be hard to find something that penciled out as well.”
Sondland? Sondland gave the neighbors the back of his transactional hand.
He accused them of “extortive” demands. “We don’t respond well to extortion,” he said. “’Go ahead and go public,’ we said. ‘We really don’t care.’”
He also said his obligation was to his profits and his investors, not the quality of life and commerce on Hayden Island.
“You’re implying that because I serve on the art museum board, which is something I’m doing for the community, that somehow carries the responsibility to encumber my real estate,” Sondland said. “I don’t understand the connection. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
He couldn’t fathom a reason to “put an artificial restriction on our property. Why would we do that?”
The health and well-being of the erotic dancers on the poles? The families down the street? The property values in the shadow of Lottery Row?
That collateral damage didn’t register on his transactional balance sheet.
Craford and his friends went public. Sondland and Durant never struck that deal with the “gentlemen’s club.” He found other lucrative ways to raise the money he bundled for Republican candidates, waiting for that ambassadorship and the precious opportunity to hail European heads of state by their first names.
The transaction cost Sondland a cool million, probably more. And it’s quid providence quo that the posting just happened to be in the shady corner of the world where Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, a Democratic frontrunner in the 2020 presidential campaign.
He’s running scared now, worried that his Cabinet ambitions and his chic hotels will be tarred by the impeachment frenzy. Trump may already have a derisive nickname in the works. I don’t know if Sondland deserves that. But root for him? Feel the least tinge of sympathy? Wish him safe travels on this ongoing ego trip?
Why would we do that?
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com