Testimony implicates Trump
US President Donald Trump specifically inquired about political investigations he wanted carried out by Ukraine during a July phone call with a top US diplomat, who then told colleagues that the president was most interested in a probe into former vice-president Joe Biden and his son, a State Department aide has said in closed-door testimony that could significantly advance House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
David Holmes, an embassy staffer in Kyiv, testified that he overheard a July 26 phone call in which Trump pressed US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would ‘‘do the investigation’’, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
‘‘Ambassador Sondland replied that, ‘He’s gonna do it,’ adding that President Zelensky will do anything you ask him to’,’’ Holmes said, according to these people.
Holmes’s testimony directly implicates Trump in an alleged scheme at the heart of the impeachment probe, which Democrats have pursued in an attempt to prove that the president leveraged military assistance and an Oval Office meeting in exchange for investigations into Biden and a debunked theory concerning Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
It came just hours after Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, told the House Intelligence Committee that Trump recalled her after a ‘‘smear campaign’’ aimed at advancing corrupt interests in Ukraine.
Yovanovitch, who said she had felt threatened by Trump’s previous negative comments about her, was forced to respond to a fresh attack by the president while she spoke. ‘‘It’s very intimidating,’’ she said after Trump took to Twitter during her testimony to criticise her career.
Holmes testified that he overheard parts of Trump’s phone call with Sondland during a lunch in Kyiv, because the president was speaking so loudly that his voice was audible to others sitting at the table nearby, according to the people familiar with the testimony.
His testimony raises the stakes for next week’s testimony by Sondland, who will be pressed to answer questions about the call. He didn’t mention it during closed-door testimony before lawmakers last month.
Holmes testified that when he asked Sondland about Trump’s views concerning Ukraine after the phone call, Sondland said Trump didn’t care about the country and was primarily interested in the investigations it could provide into allegations of corruption by Biden and his son Hunter being pushed by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
During her testimony, Yovanovitch criticised Giuliani and Trump, saying that ‘‘foreign and corrupt interests hijacked our Ukraine policy’’ with their help.
Her five-hour testimony, which ended to a crescendo of applause, took a dramatic turn when Trump took to Twitter to denigrate her again as she spoke.
‘‘Everywhere Marie
Yovanovitch went turned bad,’’ the president wrote shortly after the diplomat’s opening statement.
Trump’s attack on a widely respected Foreign Service officer drew widespread criticism, with many Democratic lawmakers calling it witness intimidation, and some Republicans distancing themselves from the president’s scorched-earth tactics even as they pushed back against the Democrats’ charge.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters during a break in the hearing that the nation had just seen ‘‘witness intimidation in real time by the president of the United States’’. Other Democrats discussed drafting an article of impeachment related to obstruction of justice.
Earlier, the White House released a rough transcript of Trump’s April 21 phone call with Zelensky, a largely congratulatory conversation after Zelensky’s election victory. While Trump viewed the call as exculpatory, it quickly became a controversy of its own after discrepancies between the rough transcript and a previous White House readout of the call were discovered.
Asked to respond to allegations that he committed witness tampering by tweeting disparagingly about
Yovanovitch during her testimony, Trump said the real tampering was done by the Democrats for not allowing White House lawyers to ask questions or the Republicans to call their own witnesses.
‘‘I have the right to speak. I have freedom of speech, just as other people do,’’ he said.