Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s former envoy to Ukraine said Tuesday he wasn’t aware of attempts to prod that country into investigating Joe Biden, and he rejected a “conspiracy theory” promoted by Rudy Giuliani that the former vice president used his influence to quash a probe that could involve his son.

Kurt Volker, who until recently was the special U.S. envoy to Ukraine, testified to the House committee conducting an impeachment inquiry that he wasn’t involved in key discussions and meetings that touched on Biden and his son’s participation on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

“At no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden,” Volker said. “As you know from the extensive, real-time documentation I have provided, Vice President Biden was not a topic of our discussions. I was not on the July 25 phone call” between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Volker testified with former National Security Council official Timothy Morrison, who was on the July call that has become central to the investigation of the president being led by House Democrats.

Morrison said Ukraine is on the front line facing Russian aggression and deserves the full, bipartisan support of the U.S. He said he worried at the time of Trump’s July 25 call that a disclosure of its contents would have a negative effect in Washington.

“My fears have been realized,” Morrison said.

Three days of hearings this week will provide lawmakers and the public with testimony from nine witnesses who have firsthand accounts of events surrounding the question of whether Trump and his allies tried to leverage U.S. aid and a White House visit for Zelenskiy in exchange for Ukraine opening investigations involving Biden, which would the benefit the president politically.

Earlier Tuesday, a decorated U.S Army officer who works at the White House and a State Department official both said Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s leader was an unusual and inappropriate attempt to get another nation to launch a politically motivated investigation.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman said the Trump-Zelenskiy call so alarmed him that he reported it through the administration’s legal channels.

“Without hesitation, I knew that I had to report this to the White House counsel,” Vindman testified.

Jennifer Williams, a State Department employee assigned to Vice President Mike Pence’s office, said she found Trump’s conversation unusual “because, in contrast to other presidential calls I had observed, it involved discussion of what appeared to be a domestic political matter.”

Volker is a crucial witness for both Democrats and Republicans in the impeachment inquiry. He’s a career government foreign policy official who was recruited early in the Trump administration to handle Ukraine policy.

But he also became one of three officials — along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland — delegated by some in the White House to conduct a back-channel effort on Ukraine that also involved Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

Volker’s opening statement offered details for both sides to latch onto. Republicans will be encouraged that he said he had no knowledge of a quid pro quo of the idea of releasing aid in exchange for a promise to investigate the Biden family and the events of 2016.

Yet Volker also denied a central Republican talking point of the impeachment inquiry, arguing that there was no merit to claims that Biden did anything wrong in relation to Ukraine and its former prosecutor.

Volker may provoke some incredulity though with his contention that he never drew a link between demands that Ukraine investigate Burisma and concerns about the Biden family, even though Giuliani at one point mentioned the allegations against the former vice president.

“At the one in-person meeting I had with Mayor Giuliani on July 19, Mayor Giuliani raised, and I rejected, the conspiracy theory that Vice President Biden would have been influenced in his duties as vice president by money paid to his son,” Volker said in his opening statement.

Volker said he didn’t understand that others viewed any investigation of Burisma, which had a history of corruption accusations, as “tantamount to investigating Vice President Biden.”

He said he was unaware that Trump mentioned Biden on his call with Zelenskiy until the White House released a rough transcript of the call on Sept. 25. During the call, Trump instead made reference to a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election and asked Zelenskiy to “look into” whether Biden stopped anti-corruption investigation of Burisma.

“In hindsight, I now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, ‘Burisma,’ as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Biden,” Volker said.

The House inquiry so far hasn’t caused any significant swing in public opinion about whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office, nor has it so far broken a solid wall of support for the president among GOP lawmakers. Yet the live coverage and constant drumbeat of revelations could damage the president politically as he campaigns for reelection in 2020 with already low approval ratings.

Throughout the day, Republicans attacked the process and the witnesses as prejudiced against the president.

“The Democrats have called a parade of government officials who don’t like President Trump’s Ukraine policy, even though they all acknowledge he provided Ukraine with lethal military aid after the Obama administration refused to do so,” Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said.

“They don’t seem to understand that the president alone is constitutionally vested with the authority to set the policy. The American people elect a president, not an interagency consensus,” he said.