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The addition of Mr. Holmes to the witness list follows a closed-door deposition he gave Friday describing a cellphone conversation he listened to in July. While sitting on the outdoor patio of a restaurant in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital also known as Kiev, Mr. Holmes said he heard the president ask Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, if President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would move forward with the investigations Mr. Trump sought.

Late Monday, the House Intelligence Committee released transcripts of the testimony of Mr. Holmes and David Hale, the under secretary of state for political affairs.

Mr. Holmes called the cellphone conversation he overheard in Kyiv between the president and Mr. Sondland remarkable, and he testified that it was clear to him that officials in Ukraine gradually came to understand that they were being asked to do something in exchange for the meeting and the security assistance hold being lifted. His account underscored that, contrary to Mr. Trumps claim that Ukraines leaders never knew American aid was being withheld, top officials there were well aware that it was, and that they had to do what the president wanted before they could receive it.

Mr. Holmes gave a vivid account of the cellphone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sondland, and of a subsequent conversation in which the ambassador told Mr. Holmes that Mr. Trump did not care about Ukraine, only about big things, such as investigations of the Bidens.

Theres just so much about the call that was so remarkable that I remember it vividly, Mr. Holmes said, according to the transcript. He said he recounted the conversation to his boss at the embassy after the lunch and said she was shocked by it. Mr. Holmes said that in morning embassy staff meetings, he would often refer back to the call as a way of trying to explain Mr. Trumps reluctance to schedule a White House meeting with Mr. Zelensky.

I would say, Well, as we know, he doesnt really care about Ukraine. He cares about some other things, Mr. Holmes testified.

Mr. Hale offered new details about deliberations within the State Department over the recall of Marie L. Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine. By the end of March, he said the department was debating whether to issue a statement of support for her amid unrelenting attacks by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer, and others.

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Ex-Envoy to Testify He Didnt Know Ukraine Aid Was Tied to Investigations - The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) Federal prosecutors are planning to interview an executive with Ukraines state-owned gas company as part of an ongoing probe into the business dealings of Rudy Giuliani and two of his Soviet-born business associates.

A lawyer for Andrew Favorov confirmed Tuesday that he is scheduled to meet voluntarily with the U.S. Justice Department. Favorov is the director of the integrated gas division at Naftogaz, the state-owned gas provider in Ukraine.

Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating the business dealings of Giuliani, President Donald Trumps personal lawyer, including whether he failed to register as a foreign agent, according to people familiar with the probe. The people were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Giulianis close associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested last month at an airport outside Washington while trying to board a flight to Europe with one-way tickets. They were later indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records.

Following an inquiry from The Associated Press, Favorov lawyer Lanny Breuer confirmed his client is set to meet with prosecutors.

The Department of Justice has requested an interview, Breuer said. He has agreed and will voluntarily sit down with the government attorneys. At this time, it would not be appropriate to comment further.

Breuer declined to say when or where Favorov, who has dual U.S.-Russian citizenship and lives in Ukraine, will be meeting with prosecutors.

Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.

According to a federal indictment filed last month, Parnas and Fruman are alleged to have been key players in Giulianis efforts earlier this year to spur the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The two mens efforts included helping to arrange a January meeting in New York between Giuliani and Ukraines former top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, as well as other meetings with top government officials.

While the House impeachment hearings have focused narrowly on Giulianis role in pursuing Ukrainian investigations into Democrats, the interest of federal prosecutors in interviewing Favorov suggests they are conducting a broader probe into the business dealings of Giuliani and his associates.

The Associated Press reported on Oct. 7 that while they were working with Giuliani to push for investigating the Bidens, Parnas and Fruman were also leveraging political connections to Trump and other prominent Republicans as part of an effort to enrich themselves.

In March, Parnas and Fruman approached Favorov while the Ukrainian executive was attending an energy industry conference in Texas. Over drinks and dinner, Giulianis associates told him they had flown in from Florida on a private jet to recruit him to be their partner in a new venture to export up to 100 tanker shipments a year of U.S. liquefied gas into Ukraine, where Naftogaz is the largest distributor, according to two people Favorov later briefed on the details.

As part of the plan, Parnas suggested backing Favorov to replace his boss, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. Parnas is reported to have also told Favorov that Trump planned to remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and replace her with someone more open to aiding their business interests. Yovanovitch was recalled to Washington in May.

Giuliani, who has described Parnas and Fruman as his clients, has denied involvement in the two mens efforts to forge a gas deal in Ukraine.

___

Follow Associated Press investigative reporters Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck and Desmond Butler at http://twitter.com/desmondbutler

___

Contact APs global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

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Ukrainian gas executive cooperating in US probe of Giuliani - The Associated Press

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Republicans are getting to the rock-bottom of it.

They have defended President Trump throughout the public impeachment hearings by arguing his gangster efforts to force a Ukrainian investigation into its (imagined) interference in the 2016 election were actually completely legitimate. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has made this point repeatedly, assailing Democrats for their alleged collaboration with Ukrainian election interference efforts and asking, as he did during former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch's testimony, "what is the full extent of Ukraine's election meddling against the Trump campaign?"

If you're unfamiliar with the paranoid depths of the right-wing media universe, this kind of talk probably puzzled you. But make no mistake: The Ukraine fantasies peddled by House Republicans are nothing less than a concerted attempt to do what the GOP has done with all of Trump's misconduct since the beginning of his presidency to use a combination of denial and redirection to foment skepticism and doubt about the underlying charges.

In this case, the Ukraine meddling red herring is used to justify Trump's obstructive acts and his attempts to extort the Ukrainian government into opening an investigation in exchange for military aid and a White House visit. And if Democrats don't begin a major effort to dismantle this nonsense in public, they may very well lose the battle for public opinion in the same way they allowed themselves to get outfoxed with the Mueller probe.

When referencing the Ukraine ideas, Democrats have called them "discredited" and "debunked" over and over again, which of course they are. But referring to them as such does nothing to prove it to voters who don't read Vox explainers and Washington Post investigative reports. To the kind of "pox on both houses" voters whose mood swings might determine the outcome of the 2020 election, all they hear is people from two parties they hate yelling at one another and accusing each other of the exact same things.

One important reason Democrats must be better prepared to fend off Ukraine-related conspiracy mongering is that Attorney General Barr is preparing some kind of ginned-up report that will line up neatly with Republican efforts in the hearings to pin 2016 election interference on Ukraine. It will suck all of the oxygen out of the proceedings for days or even weeks. Earlier this year, Barr tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham with investigating the origins of the various Trump-Russia investigations in 2016, which culminated in the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2017. The Department of Justice recently revealed, ominously, that this was now a criminal probe. Barr himself has been jet-setting around the world looking for confirmatory evidence.

What's it all about? There are two Ukraine-related conspiracy theories, which are likely to converge in the coming weeks as GOP efforts to save Trump accelerate. The first involves the infamous Russian hacking of the DNC in the spring of 2016, which led to months of leaked emails disseminated via Wikileaks, whose release was often timed to inflict maximum damage on the Clinton campaign. In his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky, Trump asked him about "Crowdstrike" and the "server." This references a truly insane, far-right fantasy that in fact it was Ukraine, in collaboration with the Clinton campaign, that hacked the DNC and then blamed it on Russia to make the Trump campaign look guilty.

In this make-believe world, Crowdstrike cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian (he is actually an American citizen who serves as a fellow on the august Atlantic Council) who absconded back to his country with the server, and the FBI had to take their word for it that Russia was culpable. Back on Earth-1, on the other hand, Crowdstrike provided the FBI with all of its forensic data, no serious person disputes that Russia was responsible for the hacking, and there is no single "server" which can be physically transported to Kiev.

The Crowdstrike lunacy has not yet been affirmatively advanced by Republicans in these hearings, although no one should be surprised if it is. But the idea that Ukraine was responsible for triggering the FBI's counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign has now gone mainstream.

The story goes like this: Corrupt Ukrainians fabricated a "black ledger" implicating former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort in various forms of corruption when he was a key advisor to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian stooge, so that the Trump campaign's May 2016 hiring of Manafort as campaign manager would look especially suspicious. In this telling, the incident in which Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat about how Russia had stolen dirt on Clinton was actually a CIA set-up.

The conspiracy theory then alleges that at the same time, Ukrainian embassy officials were working with a consultant named Alexandra Chalupa (who held a minor post with the DNC) to channel incriminating information about Trump and Manafort to reporters and intelligence agencies. CIA Director John Brennan then supposedly manipulated this information and baited the FBI into opening its investigation. (This is why House Republicans put Chalupa on a list of witnesses they wanted to testify.) The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, was using a firm called Fusion GPS, which paid former British spy Christopher Steele to produce a lurid dossier about Trump. (Though of course it wasn't released and was only made public by Buzzfeed after the election.) The FBI, supposedly at Brennan's behest, then improperly used information gleaned from Ukrainians via Chalupa and Steele to trigger its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. (There's more, of course, but this is an article, not a book.)

To simplify for those who are still with me: Corrupt U.S. intelligence officials glommed onto false allegations pushed at them by Ukrainians terrified of a Trump administration and used them to launch years of phony investigations against both candidate and President Trump. The Mueller report, so this story goes, proved that this was all a hoax from the get-go, and now President Trump and Attorney General Barr just want to get to the truth about what really happened.

It should almost go without saying that this is all nonsense, the product of shut-ins decorating large poster boards with paranoid speculation and unsubstantiated rumors and then laundering it all through various luminaries in the right-wing media cocoon. None of it makes any real sense.

To have worked, it had to have involved former CIA director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The number of conspirators must have run into the hundreds, many of whom would have been career public servants (as opposed to political appointees) in the intelligence agencies and the FBI. Yet none of them are talking?

Second, if the FBI was part of a plot to destroy then-candidate Trump, why did FBI Director James Comey then go out of his way to assail Clinton as "extremely careless" in his June 5, 2016, press conference and then theatrically announce that he was looking at new emails just days before the presidential election, a maneuver that may have led directly to her loss?

Third, why would the Clinton campaign have conspired with Ukraine against itself to release a long series of damaging or distracting emails from people like John Podesta?

Lastly, in the closing days of the campaign, when the polls had tightened and there was a very real possibility of Trump winning the election, why didn't any of the conspirators do more to release this information to the media? Why would the conspirators bury their own conspiracy?

The problem for Democrats is that these questions don't immediately come to mind for most people. Americans, most of whom who have not read the 448-page Mueller Report and are only dimly aware of the many troubling details about the Trump campaign's efforts to work with Russian hackers to subvert the 2016 election, watched Democrats simply walk away and turn off the lights after Mueller's July 24 testimony before Congress, seemingly resigned to the president's triumphant efforts to obstruct justice. Now Democrats have to contend with this Republican counternarrative, which if not pushed back on aggressively, will appear just as credible to the modestly informed.

It might sound equally bonkers, but Democrats should think about tackling it all head-on, perhaps by calling in a leading Ukraine conspiracy advocate like Sean Hannity to testify before Congress, followed by witnesses like Brennan who can then dismantle it all piece by piece. There is no way that Hannity or anyone else would be able to hold it together through hours of interrogation by Daniel Goldman, who capably led some of the questioning for House Democrats in last week's hearings. Give Republicans their wish and bring in Chalupa, who is desperate to testify. Bring in Alperovitch. If they really want to stop the news cycle and force everyone to watch, bring in former President Obama himself. Take a week, and blow the whole kooky theory to pieces.

Remember: This is all one story. The Trump-Giuliani Ukraine caper was partly about screwing with the 2020 election, but it was also about fabricating evidence to support the administration's nutso counter-narrative that the real villains in 2016 weren't the Russians but rather Ukrainians and Obama administration officials from the "deep state" working together to smear Our Great President. The behavior that led to these impeachment hearings is part of a maximalist plot to completely exonerate both Russia and the president of any wrongdoing, all driven by Trump's thin-skinned obsession with legitimacy, and his administration's barely-concealed hunger to engage in further abuses of power.

If they get away with this, they can get away with anything, and they know it. That's why Democrats need to take the time to get this story right, and convince the public that there is nothing to the GOP's Ukraine fever dreams but sweaty sheets and bad faith.

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The Republicans' Ukraine conspiracy theory is going mainstream - The Week

WASHINGTON On the April night she answered a 1 a.m. phone call instructing her to take the next plane back to Washington, Marie L. Yovanovitch, the ousted United States ambassador to Ukraine, was at her home in Kiev after having just finished hosting an event to honor a young anticorruption activist who had been killed in horrific fashion.

The activist, Kateryna Handziuk, was outside her home in the Ukrainian city of Kherson in July 2018 when someone splashed her with a quart of sulfuric acid, severely burning more than 30 percent of her body. After 11 surgeries over three months, Ms. Handziuk succumbed to her excruciating wounds. She was 33.

In public impeachment hearings, the former ambassador testified Friday about the chronology of her abrupt recall from Ukraine after a campaign of unsubstantiated allegations against her that reached President Trump. Speaking before a House committee, she also spotlighted Ms. Handziuks story, and underscored why she had been honoring her legacy that April night in an official award ceremony attended by Ms. Handziuks father.

She very tragically died because she was attacked by acid, and several months later died a very, very painful death, Ms. Yovanovitch testified. We thought it was important that justice be done for Katya and others who fight corruption in Ukraine because its not kind of a tabletop exercise there. Their lives are in the balance.

Ms. Handziuk, an outspoken critic of graft and political corruption in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine near Russia-occupied Crimea, was among dozens of activists who human rights groups say have been attacked in the former Soviet republic now at the center of impeachment proceedings. Five men were convicted of carrying out the attack. But Ms. Yovanovitch said on Friday that those who ordered this have not yet been apprehended.

Her appearance helped make real the abstract concept of the fight against corruption in Ukraine, which has been a central theme of an impeachment inquiry examining whether Mr. Trump distorted American diplomacy for his own political gain. Her comments showed how, even as Ukraine fights Russian-backed separatists for territory in its eastern regions, a parallel fight is being waged by activists and journalists who risk their safety to expose wrongdoing by politicians, mob bosses and oligarchs who often work in tandem against democratic overhauls long urged by the United States and Europe.

Speaking of the slain activist, and others carrying on that effort, Ms. Yovanovitch said, The message was: This could happen to you, if you continue her work.

Among Ms. Handziuks causes had been focusing attention on police passivity in the face of attacks on fellow activists. Two weeks before Ms. Handziuk became a victim herself, a leading anticorruption activist in Kiev, Vitaliy Shabunin, suffered chemical burns after someone dumped a caustic antiseptic over his head at a public protest, temporarily dying his skin green.

Her death stirred outrage across Ukraine, prompting protests in at least five cities. It also drew recognition from the very top of the State Department. In March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hosted a Women of Courage awards ceremony at the State Department, in which Ms. Handziuk was one of the honorees.

Its also important that we pause to recognize and honor those women who paid the ultimate price for their courageous efforts, women like Kateryna Handziuk of Ukraine, who dedicated her journalism career to uncovering and calling out corruption, Mr. Pompeo said. Even after a brutal acid attack, which ultimately claimed her life three months later, Kateryna refused to be silenced. From her hospital bed, she demanded justice, setting a powerful example for her fellow citizens.

Less than two months after that event, while hosting Ms. Handziuks father at her home in Kiev to present him with the award, Ms. Yovanovitch received a 10 p.m. call from a senior State Department official first warning that there were unspecified concerns about her among senior levels of the department. A follow-up call three hours later advised her to take the next plane back to Washington.

On the first anniversary of Ms. Handziuks death this month, Ms. Yovanovitchs acting successor in Kiev, William B. Taylor Jr., recorded a video tribute posted by the American Embassy there. We urge justice for Katya and her family. We remember her and we will continue to push for the kind of Ukraine that she gave her life for, Mr. Taylor, currently the chief of mission in Kiev, said.

Just two days later, Mr. Taylor himself testified before the House. Trump administration officials had set up an irregular, informal channel of diplomacy there, he said, one that hampered the American effort to help Ukraine defeat corruption.

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Ex-Envoys Tale of Acid Attack Spotlights Ukraines Anticorruption Wars - The New York Times

Solomon, a former reporter at The Associated Press and The Washington Post, has emerged as a key player in the Ukraine scandal, with testimony continuing this week about Trump and his allies put pressure on the country to open politically motivated investigations as military aid was withheld.

At Solomon's former employer, The Post, Paul Farhi wrote how the "conservative columnist helped push a flawed Ukraine narrative. The New York Times last week dubbed Solomon the man Trump trusts for news on Ukraine.

Solomon has defended his work, including on Friday in an email to POLITICO. "I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote and that The Hill (both editors and lawyers) carefully vetted, he wrote. All facts in those stories are substantiated to original source documents and statements."

The journalists comments on Friday came after California Rep. Jackie Speier told Scott Wong, a senior staff writer at The Hill, that she wouldnt speak to the publication because of its reprehensible decision to run Solomons columns, which she said lacked veracity. Speier also urged Wong to take her concerns to management.

Wong told Speier that there are a lot of dedicated reporters at The Hill who do not share John Solomons views. Last year, some journalists at The Hill complained to management about Solomons work, which was later moved from the news side to the opinion section. Solomon departed The Hill in September and later joined Fox News as a contributor.

Cusack did not mention Speiers critique in Mondays memo, which pointed to recent Congressional testimony and related events as the impetus for revisiting Solomons work.

The Hills top editor also reiterated that publication does not condone sending material out before publication. Its been revealed in the impeachment inquiry that Solomon shared a draft of one of his Hill columns with allies of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. I do go over stories in advance, Solomon told the Times in defending the practice.

Cusack concluded his note by emphasizing that The Hill remains committed to giving voice to views across the political divide.

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The Hill vows to review Solomon's Ukraine pieces - Politico