US Diplomat Told Congress He Raised Issue of Hunter Biden, Ukraine

Inquiry into Trump call

House Democrats are looking into a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy and whether Trump pressed Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

House and Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have introduced legislation prohibiting funding for next year’s Group of Seven summit if it is held at a Trump-owned resort in southern Florida, as the U.S. president intends.

The decision has raised questions over whether Trump’s move could be an impeachable offense since the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal officials from receiving any gifts, payments or other things of value from foreign representatives, unless approved by Congress.

Trump calls the impeachment inquiry a “witch hunt” motivated by Democrats’ bitterness over his 2016 surprise victory.

Trump’s re-election campaign has begun selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Get Over It.”

Parallel foreign policy

Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly, who sat in on Kent’s testimony, told reporters this week that the diplomat also described a parallel foreign policy effort to sideline career diplomats on Ukraine and place relations with the country in the hands of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor, Energy Secretary Perry and Trump’s then-special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker.

State Department diplomats, administration national security officials and a Defense Department Ukraine policy expert are scheduled to testify before the House inquiry next week.

On Thursday, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney startled Washington when he told reporters that Trump’s decision to withhold the security aid from Ukraine was linked to Trump’s desire for Kyiv to investigate a theory, long ago debunked, that a Democratic National Committee computer server was held in Ukraine.

Trump has denied that he ever used the American foreign aid as leverage to get Zelenskiy to look into U.S. political matters, but he has publicly urged both Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens.

Meanwhile, U.S. House Republicans on Friday ramped up their demand that Democrats investigating Trump provide lawmakers with access to all materials gathered by the three committees during their closed-door interviews and depositions.