The GOP did not have a good day in Tuesday’s impeachment inquiry hearings. After a morning session in which witnesses Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams repeatedly thwarted Republicans’ impeachment defenses, the House Intelligence Committee’s afternoon testimony saw the GOP strategy fail once again, as former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and former National Security Council official Tim Morrison took the stand. The two former officials, who House Republicans had specifically requested to have testify, offered a more muted testimony regarding President Donald Trump‘s alleged quid pro quo scheme in Ukraine—but nonetheless still managed to offer up some damaging information. For Volker, who was previously the first witness to offer closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee and claimed he saw no evidence of a quid pro quo, this came in the form of some new revelations. The ambassador testified Tuesday that since giving his initial testimony, he “learned a lot” about the Ukraine scheme—namely, that it actually wasn’t the totally above-board political campaign that he apparently believed it to be.
The main thing that Volker appeared to realize in the ensuing time since his closed-door testimony, the ambassador testified Tuesday, is that when Trump and Rudy Giuliani pushed for investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian company on whose board Hunter Biden sat, and the 2016 election, they weren’t actually pushing for a good-faith investigation into Ukrainian corruption. Claiming that he believed at the time that the administration’s repeated requests for Ukraine to launch “investigations” was actually a request for them to investigate the Ukrainians involved with Burisma and any 2016 wrongdoing, Volker testified that he apparently did not realize that to Trump and Giuliani, investigating Burisma actually meant investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, the president’s political rival. “I did not understand that others believed that any investigation of the Ukrainian company, Burisma, which had a history of accusations of corruption, was tantamount to investigating Vice President Biden,” Volker testified. “I drew a sharp distinction between the two.” The ambassador’s supposed ignorance to the actual substance of the Trump administration’s investigation push, of course, somewhat strains credulity, given that Volker played a key role in helping the Ukrainians draft a Giuliani-requested statement that would signal their intent to investigate corruption, received text messages alluding to “withhold[ing] security assistance for help with a political campaign,” and was present for a July 10 meeting in which Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland specifically brought up the political investigations. Giuliani has also made many statements about Ukraine that specifically reference Biden, including comments made to Volker himself. At a July 19 meeting with Giuliani, Volker testified, the attorney “mentioned both the accusations about Vice President Biden, and about interference in the 2016 election, and stressed that all he wanted to see was for Ukraine to investigate what happened in the past and apply its own laws.”
Much to Republicans’ chagrin, however, Volker’s apparent revelation about Trump’s wrongdoing means he’s now definitely not defending the scheme that he accidentally played a role in executing. The former special envoy testified in his opening statement that he “now understand[s] that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, ‘Burisma,’ as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Biden,” which he does not agree with. “I saw them as very different—the former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable,” Volker said Tuesday. “In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objections.” Volker also testified that he “rejected the conspiracy theory that Vice President Biden would have been influenced in his duties as Vice President by money paid to his son.” “As I testified previously, I have known Vice President Biden for 24 years,” Volker continued. “He is an honorable man andI hold him in the highest regard.”
Morrison, a former longtime Republican staffer who’s viewed as a Trump loyalist, also managed to deliver Democrats some helpful intel. Even as he refused to declare Trump’s Ukraine dealings improper, Morrison nevertheless managed to confirm the existence of a quid pro quo arrangement that tied military aid to Ukraine to the Ukrainians issuing a statement agreeing to investigate Burisma and 2016. In a line of questioning from House Intelligence Committee counsel Daniel S. Goldman, Morrison recalled that Sondland had told him he had told Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak “that the Ukrainians would have to have the prosecutor general make a statement with respect to the investigations as a condition of having the aid lifted.” Morrison, like Volker, also acknowledged that pressuring a foreign government to investigate a political rival is generally wrong, and though Morrison insisted Tuesday that he saw nothing wrong with Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he nevertheless reported the call to NSC Legal Adviser John Eisenberg out of a fear over how the call becoming public “would play in Washington’s political climate.” In a line of questioning from Rep. Eric Swalwell, Swalwell suggested that Morrison’s failure to bring up Trump’s desire to see Ukraine investigate his rivals in post-July 25 conversations with Ukrainian officials, along with his willingness to testify in the impeachment inquiry, led to the conclusion that he may be more opposed to Trump’s investigation push than he’s publicly let on. “Mr. Morrison, whether you acknowledge it publicly or not, I believe that you knew that what the president asked the Ukrainians to do was wrong,” Swalwell said Tuesday. “I don’t think you believed [pushing the investigations] was a lawful order and that’s why you did not follow-up on those priorities.”