The latest word is that Gordon Sondland may testify after all:
Oregon's Rep. Earl Blumenauer called for a boycott (www.opb.org/...) of Gordon Sondland's six Portland hotels.
U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) today urged travelers to boycott Provenance Hotels, the Portland-based chain founded by the Hon. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.
"Anyone who cares about America should not do any business or stay at any of Gordon Sondland's hotels. Not until he fulfills his duty as a citizen to testify and turn over all relevant documents to the House of Representatives," Blumenauer said in a statement today. "Nobody is above the law. Mr. Sondland and the entire Trump administration need to be reminded of that."
Blumenauer probably didn’t have to issue this call for a boycott. If Sondland refused to testify the boycott could have developed on its own or with help from the organized resistance.
Portland is known to be one of the most progressive cities in the country, so progressive in fact that anti-Trump rallies have become magnets for the violent pro-Trump Proud Boys to come from near and far to mount sometimes violent counter-protests.
I’d like to believe that assuming Sondland testifies, and does so honestly, it is because he did so as a matter of conscience. However considering it wouldn’t take much effort for a boycott of his hotels to impact his profits one can’t dismiss this as a possible motivation.
Now that he is a national figure he’s gone from being an obscure local hotel owner to someone who could become a progressive Portland pariah.
Portland Resistance’s Facebook page has almost 29,000 followers — www.facebook.com/...
Disclaimer: I am not a member of PDX Resistance. However I am a Portland resident. I know several people who have attended anti-Trump speaker gatherings like the one in the photo above. My friends who are seniors avoid rallies where there is a potential for violence although we all approve of the police chief’s efforts to thwart attempts of the Proud Boys to disrupt peaceful rallies.