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Today, Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Eliot L. Engel, the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the Acting Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, released the transcripts of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch and former Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State Ambassador P. Michael McKinley.

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In a significant reversal, a top US diplomat revised his testimony to impeachment investigators to admit a quid pro quo linking US aid to Ukraine with an investigation into President Donald Trump's political rival.

US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on Monday sent the committees a three-page addition to his testimony, saying he had remembered a September 1 conversation in which he told a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the security aid was linked to investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and the 2016 election.

"I now recall speaking individually with Mr. (Andriy) Yermak, where I said resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks," Sondland said.

Sondland's new testimony, which was included in the public release of his closed-door deposition transcript on Tuesday, adds to Democrats' evidence that the President connected the freezing of US security aid to Ukraine to investigations into Biden as well as the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's servers during the 2016 election, which cuts to the heart of their impeachment case against Trump. The committees have now heard from several witnesses, including top US diplomat in Ukraine Bill Taylor and National Security Council aide Tim Morrison, who have testified that Ukraine opening such investigations was linked to $400 million in US security aid and a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Zelensky.

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Originally posted by wtg:
I'm reading Yovanovitch's testimony. Scary.

The State Department is in shambles.

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Originally posted by wtg:
Tim Morrison, formerly of the NSC.

https://intelligence.house.gov...on_final_version.pdf

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Well, he was concerned that -- principally that he did not always know what Rudy was doing. He and I discussed a lack of, shall we say, OPSEC, that much of Rudy's discussions were happening oven an unclassified cell phone on, perhaps as bad, WhatsApp messages, and therefore you can only imagine who else knew about them.

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I remember being focused on the fact that there were text messages, the fact that Rudy was having all of these phone calls over unclassified media. And I found that to be highly problematic and indicative of someone who didn't reaIly understand how national security processes are run.