In what could be the last round of public hearings in the Democrats’ high-speed impeachment inquiry, two senior national security experts testified Thursday that President Trump had pressed for investigations in Ukraine that were designed to help him politically.
David Holmes, a State Department veteran now based in Kyiv, and Fiona Hill, Trump’s former leading advisor on Russian affairs, testified for almost six hours on Capitol Hill, where they painted a damaging portrait of Trump and his allies clamoring for the launch of foreign-born probes that appeared to lack a national security objective.
Holmes described an episode in Kyiv in July when he overheard a phone conversation between Trump and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, in which the president sought updates on the investigations into the 2016 elections and the son of former Vice President Joe Biden. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my foreign service career,” he said.
Hill, who left her post voluntarily over the summer, voiced similarly dire concerns that Trump, through personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, threatened “to blow up” years of foreign policy objectives in Kyiv in pursuit of personal political interests. And she dismissed the GOP’s argument that the investigation is a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
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