House investigators depose a senior State Department official.
The parade of administration witnesses heading to Capitol Hill to be deposed by House impeachment investigators continued on Tuesday, as George P. Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, was questioned behind closed doors.
Mr. Kent, wearing a three-piece suit and bow tie, entered the obscured chambers of the House Intelligence Committee to kick off another jam-packed day for investigators. Lawmakers are scheduled to return to the Capitol from a two-week recess later Tuesday, and Democrats will huddle to compare notes on the direction of the inquiry. Separately, the committees leading the investigation had set a series of crucial deadlines on Tuesday for key witnesses and executive branch agencies, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to hand over relevant documents.
Mr. Kent, who appeared despite the White House’s declaration it would halt witnesses from cooperating with investigators, raised concerns with colleagues early this year about the pressure being directed at Ukraine by Mr. Trump and his private lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to pursue investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals, according to people familiar with Mr. Kent’s warnings.
As far back as March, they said, Mr. Kent was pointing to Mr. Giuliani’s role in what he called a “disinformation” campaign intended to use a Ukrainian prosecutor to smear targets of the president. Those included former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Marie L. Yovanovitch, then the United States ambassador to Ukraine, and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information during the 2016 campaign about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Mr. Kent is one of a number of officials at the State Department and elsewhere in the administration who have been tapped by impeachment investigators to help corroborate the allegations in an intelligence whistle-blower’s complaint that said the president abused his power to enlist a foreign power to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 elections.
John Bolton was alarmed by the Ukraine affair and told an aide to alert White House lawyers about it.
The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the White House last summer that so alarmed John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers, House investigators were told on Monday.
Mr. Bolton got into a tense exchange on July 10 with Gordon D. Sondland, the Trump donor turned ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to three people who heard the testimony.
The aide, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, according to the people familiar with the testimony.
“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition. (Another person in the room initially said Mr. Bolton referred to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mulvaney, but two others said he cited Mr. Sondland.)
— Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos
Read more: Bolton Objected to Ukraine Pressure Campaign, Calling Giuliani ‘a Hand Grenade’
Hunter Biden acknowledged “poor judgment,” but he rejected Mr. Trump’s suggestions that he and his father engaged in wrongdoing.
Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, said in an interview released on Tuesday that he probably would not have been named to the board of a foreign company if his last name weren’t Biden and acknowledged “poor judgment,” but he rejected suggestions by President Trump that he and his father had engaged in wrongdoing.
“Did I make a mistake? Well maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with ABC News. “But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not.”
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” he said.
Mr. Trump has seized on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China to initiate a series of unfounded attacks against the former vice president, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, over the past month.
The interview comes two days after the younger Mr. Biden pledged that he would not work for foreign-owned companies if his father became president, and just hours before the CNN/New York Times Democratic debate that will be held in central Ohio, an appearance that is critical to his father’s presidential hopes.
— Katie Glueck and Stephanie Saul
Read on: Hunter Biden Admits to ‘Poor Judgment’ but Denies ‘Ethical Lapse’ in Work Overseas
Catch up on impeachment: What you need to know about the inquiry.
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President Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
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A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint.