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Closest witnesses kicking off big Trump impeachment week

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nine witnesses. Five hearings. Three days.

The Trump impeachment inquiry is charging into a crucial week as Americans hear from some of the most important witnesses closest to the White House in back-to-back-to-back live sessions.

Among them, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the wealthy donor whose routine boasting about his proximity to Donald Trump is now bringing the investigation to the president’s doorstep.

The witnesses all are testifying under penalty of perjury, and Sondland already has had to amend his earlier account amid contradicting testimony from other current and former U.S. officials. White House insiders, including an Army officer and National Security Council aide, will launch the week’s hearings Tuesday.

It’s a pivotal time as the House’s historic inquiry accelerates and deepens. Democrats say Trump demanded that Ukraine investigate his Democratic rivals in return for U.S. military aid it needed to resist Russian aggression and that may be grounds for removing the 45th president. Trump says he did no such thing and the Democrats are just out to get him any way they can.

On Monday, Trump said he was considering an invitation from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to provide his own account to the House, possibly by submitting written testimony. That would be an unprecedented moment in this constitutional showdown between the two branches of U.S. government.

Trump tweeted: “Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!”

A ninth witness, David Holmes, a State Department official who overheard Trump talking about the investigations on a phone call with Sondland while the ambassador was at a restaurant in Kyiv, was a late addition Monday. He is scheduled to close out the week Thursday.

Tuesday’s sessions at the House Intelligence Committee will start with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer at the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, his counterpart at Vice President Mike Pence’s office.

Both are foreign policy experts who listened with concern as Trump spoke on July 25 with the newly elected Ukraine president. A government whistleblower’s complaint about that call led the House to launch the impeachment investigation.

Vindman and Williams say they were uneasy as Trump talked to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy about investigations of potential 2020 political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Vindman reported the call to NSC lawyers. Williams found it “unusual” and inserted the White House’s readout of it in Pence’s briefing book.

“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen,” said Vindman, a wounded Iraq War veteran. He said there was “no doubt” what Trump wanted.

Pence’s role remains unclear. “I just don’t know if he read it,” Williams testified in a closed-door House interview.

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