Officials Give Firsthand Accounts of Trump’s ‘Unusual’ Ukraine Call at Impeachment Hearings: Live Updates
The second week of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump began on Tuesday with officials who directly listened in on his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Four witnesses will testify on Tuesday about Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. In the morning, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, special advisor for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence, answered questions. Former U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Timothy Morrison, a former NSC official in charge of Russia and Europe policy, will testify in the afternoon.
Williams, Vindman and Morrison were all on the July 25th call where Trump told Zelensky “I would like you to do us a favor,” referring to his request to have Ukrainian officials investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals. That call is now at the heart of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether Trump abused the power of his office for his own political gain.
All three expressed varying levels of concern about the call, with Morrison and Vindman alerting their superiors. In his closed-door testimony, Vindman also recounted that he witnessed efforts by the National Security Council’s lawyer John Eisenberg to bury records of the call in a highly classified system. He told lawmakers that Eisenberg told him not to discuss his serious concerns with the call with anyone.
Williams also told investigators that notes she took at the time of the call revealed that Trump mentioned Burisma — the gas company that employed Biden’s son Hunter as a board member — even though the rough transcript of the call released by the White House did not mention the company.
Democratic officials working on the inquiry who briefed reporters on Monday described Morrison and Williams as “Republican’s Republicans,” a clear attempt to highlight that concerns about the call transcended partisan politics.
TIME reporters will be in the room and watching the testimony. Follow along for live updates and analysis.
Vindman testifies about “a sense of duty”
Vindman, an active duty military officer who has served multiple tours overseas and was wounded in Iraq, captured the attention of the hearing room when he delivered his evocative open remarks Tuesday morning. An immigrant who was born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union, Vindman said that he reported his concerns about the July 10 meeting where Sondland allegedly spoke about the requirement for Ukraine to deliver investigations to secure a meeting with Trump, and about the July 25 call “out of a sense of duty.” Vindman said that he privately reported these concerns in official channels “because they had significant national security implications for our country.”
After filing reports about his concerns, Vindman says he immediately returned to work to “advance the country’s foreign policy objectives.”
He made it clear that Tuesday’s hearing was not a setting he is accustomed to nor a process he set out to engage in. “As a young man I decided that I wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression, and for the last twenty years it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country,” Vindman said, noting next month marks 40 years since his family arrived to the United States as refugees.
Williams: “I found the July 25 call unusual”
A career foreign service officer who served stints under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in places such as Jamaica, Beirut and Syria, Williams testified that the now-infamous July 25 call was “unusual” in that it “involved discussion of what appeared to be a domestic political matter.”
Williams said she attended meetings where the hold on Ukraine’s security assistance was discussed, and that while State and Defense Department advocated for the release of the aid money, employees from the Office of Management and Budget asserted that White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney directed the hold on the funds remain in place. A couple weeks after the call, Williams learned the aid money was released — though she “never learned what prompted that decision.”
Williams said that she had participated in over a dozen calls with foreign leaders, but found this one unusual because Trump was asking Zelensky to investigate a domestic matter.