WASHINGTON (AP) —
Two top national security aides who listened to President Donald Trump’s
call with Ukraine are preparing to testify in the impeachment hearings,
launching a week of back-to-back sessions as Americans hear from those
closest to the White House.
Lt.
Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer at the National Security
Council, and Jennifer Williams, his counterpart at Vice President Mike
Pence’s office, both say they had concerns as Trump spoke on July 25
with the newly elected Ukraine president about political investigations
into Joe Biden.
After
they appear Tuesday morning, the House will hear in the afternoon from
former NSC official Timothy Morrison and Kurt Volker, the former Ukraine
special envoy.
In all, nine current and former U.S. officials are testifying in a pivotal week as the House’s historic impeachment inquiry
accelerates and deepens. Democrats say Trump demanded that Ukraine
investigate his Democratic rivals in return for U.S. military aid it
needed to resist Russian aggression and that may be grounds for removing the 45th president. Trump says he did no such thing and the Democrats just want him gone.
“I
did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government
investigate a U.S. citizen,” said Vindman, an Iraq War veteran. He said
there was “no doubt” what Trump wanted from Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
It
wasn’t the first time Vindman, a 20-year military officer, was alarmed
over the administration’s push to have Ukraine investigate Democrats, he
testified.
Earlier,
during an unsettling July 10 meeting at the White House, Ambassador
Gordon Sondland told visiting Ukraine officials that they would need to
“deliver” before next steps, which was a meeting Zelenskiy wanted with
Trump, the officer testified.
“He
was talking about the 2016 elections and an investigation into the
Bidens and Burisma,” Vindman testified, referring to the gas company in
Ukraine where Hunter Biden served on the board.
“The Ukrainians would have to deliver an investigation into the Bidens,” he said. “There was no ambiguity.”
On
both occasions, Vindman said, he took his concerns about the shifting
Ukraine policy to the lead counsel at the NSC, John Eisenberg.
Williams,
a longtime State Department official who is detailed to Pence’s
national security team, said she too had concerns during the phone call,
which the aides monitored as is standard practice.
When
the White House produced a rough transcript later that day, she put it
in the vice president’s briefing materials. “I just don’t know if he
read it,” Williams testified in a closed-door House interview.
Sondland, the wealthy donor
whose routine boasting about his proximity to Trump has brought the
investigation to the president’s doorstep, is set to testify Wednesday.
Others have testified that he was part of a shadow diplomatic effort
with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, outside of official
channels that raised alarms.
Pence’s
role throughout the impeachment inquiry has been unclear, and the vice
president’s aide is sure to be questioned by lawmakers looking for
answers.
The
White House has instructed officials not to appear, and most have
received congressional subpoenas to compel their testimony.
Trump
has already attacked Williams, associating her with “Never Trumpers,”
even though there is no indication the career State Department official
has shown any partisanship.
The
president wants to see a robust defense by his GOP allies on Capitol
Hill, but so far so far Republicans have offered a changing strategy as
the fast-moving probe spills into public view.
That
is likely to change this week as Republicans mount a more aggressive
attack on all the witnesses as the inquiry reaches closer into the White
House and they try to protect Trump.
In
particular, Republicans are expected to try to undercut Vindman,
suggesting he reported his concerns outside his chain of command, which
would have been Morrison, not the NSC lawyer.
Those
appearing in public have already given closed-door interviews to
investigators, and transcripts from those depositions have largely been
released.
Under
earlier questioning, Republicans wanted Vindman to disclose who else he
may have spoken to about his concerns, as the GOP inch closer to
publicly naming the still anonymous whistleblower whose report sparked
the inquiry.
GOP
Sen. Ron Johnson, who was deeply involved in other White House meetings
about Ukraine, offered a sneak preview of this strategy late Monday
when he compared Vindman, a Purple Heart veteran, to the “bureaucrats”
who “never accepted Trump as legitimate.”
“They
react by leaking to the press and participating in the ongoing effort
to sabotage his policies and, if possible, remove him from office. It is
entirely possible that Vindman fits this profile, said Johnson, R-Wis.
Vindman told the House investigators in his earlier testimony he was not the government whistleblower.
The
witnesses are testifying under penalty of perjury, and Sondland already
has had to amend his earlier account amid contradicting testimony from
other current and former U.S. officials.
Morrison
has referred to Burisma as a “bucket of issues” — the Bidens,
Democrats, investigations — he had tried to “stay away” from.
Sondland
met with a Zelenskiy aide on the sidelines of a Sept. 1 gathering in
Warsaw, and Morrison, who was watching the encounter from across the
room, testified that the ambassador told him moments later he pushed the
Ukrainian for the Burisma investigation as a way for Ukraine to gain
access to the military funds.
Volker
provided investigators with a package of text messages with Sondland
and another diplomat, William Taylor, the charge d’affaires in Ukraine,
who grew alarmed at the linkage of the investigations to the aid.
Taylor, who testified publicly last week, called that “crazy.”
A
wealthy hotelier who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration,
Sondland is the only person interviewed to date who had direct
conversations with the president about the Ukraine situation.
Morrison
said Sondland and Trump had spoken about five times between July 15 and
Sept. 11 — the weeks that $391 million in U.S. assistance was withheld
from Ukraine before it was released.
Trump has said he barely knows Sondland.
Besides
Sondland, the committee will hear on Wednesday from Laura Cooper, a
deputy assistant secretary of defense, and David Hale, a State
Department official. On Thursday, David Holmes, a State Department
official in Kyiv, and Fiona Hill, a former top NSC staff member for
Europe and Russia, will appear.
___
Associated
Press writers Jill Colvin and Hope Yen in Washington and Bruce
Schreiner in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.
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