(DCNF)—A leading witness in the 2019 impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald Trump registered as a foreign agent representing Ukraine and the European Union (E.U.) on Thursday.
Gordon Sondland served as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union from 2018 to 2020 and testified against Trump before the House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence in 2019, claiming that Trump sought to withhold foreign military aid to Ukraine unless it launched an investigation into then-former Vice President Joe Biden regarding his son’s business dealings in the country; Biden was running against Trump for the presidency at the time of the impeachment hearing. Sondland filed a registration statement with the U.S. Department of Justice, declaring himself a foreign agent of Ukraine and the E.U. in order to legally represent their interests in the country, according to a document obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Sondland’s registration is required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law that governs how foreign governments and other entities may lobby U.S. officials. FARA registration is required regardless of U.S. citizenship and must occur before an individual begins lobbying.
Read Sondland’s registration statement here:
Gordon Sondland – FARA Regi… by Daily Caller News Foundation
“Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’ As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes,” Sondland told the committee on Nov. 20, 2019, during a high-profile hearing that garnered international attention. “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in the 2024 election, was impeached by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18, 2019, but acquitted by the Senate on Feb. 5, 2020. Shortly afterward, he dismissed Sondland from his ambassadorial position.
During his government service, Sondland personally dealt with high-ranking Ukrainian government officials such as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since 2022, Ukraine has sought to lobby members of Congress and executive branch officials for support during its war against Russia.
Sondland defended his decision to register as a foreign agent in a telephone call with The Daily Caller News Foundation, describing it as a preventative measure to comply with FARA’s large scope, which he called “crazy.”
“This term ‘Foreign Agent.’ It sounds very sinister because that’s the way the FARA laws are written. You’re designated as a foreign agent. I’m not an agent of anyone. I haven’t been asked by Ukraine or the E.U. to represent them. I’m simply having conversations that everyone has all the time with members of Congress and with members of governments of other countries to try and bridge and divide,” Sondland told the DCNF. “The problem is the FARA laws require this registration and you become known as a ‘foreign agent,’ and that’s very different than someone who is hired by the E.U. or hired by Ukraine and paid to do a certain job on their behalf. I am not doing either.”
“My allegiance is still 100% to the United States, not to the European Union. Unfortunately, I can’t have these conversations without registering,” Sondland noted.
Sondland also pushed back against the belief that he provided testimony against Trump during the impeachment inquiry. “I relayed facts that occurred in 2019, some of which had the effect of having a negative…showing President Trump in a negative light and some showing President Trump in a positive light, but I had no agenda to testify against or for President Trump in 2019,” he claimed.
Before joining the Trump administration, Sondland was a developer and served as the chairman of Provenance Hotels, which owns a network of hotels across the United States. He donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee in 2017, according to The Intercept.
The Trump campaign, the Ukrainian mission to the United States and the European External Action Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with comments from Gordon Sondland.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 DEED.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.