The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: Latest Updates

David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, arrived on Wednesday morning to testify in the impeachment inquiry, the first administration official this week to comply with investigators’ request to appear. Democrats want to ask Mr. Hale, the under secretary for political affairs, about the ouster of the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, and why he and others did not defend her against political attacks.

The recall of Ms. Yovanovitch was part of the shadow foreign policy effort on Ukraine driven largely by Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, who sought to smear her as disloyal to the president. Ms. Yovanovitch told investigators that she personally asked Mr. Hale to talk to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about issuing a statement of support. She said she never heard back.

Mr. Hale is one of four Trump administration officials who had been summoned to testify on Wednesday.

The three others were Russell Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget; T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a counselor at the State Department who was among the officials listening in on Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with the president of Ukraine; and Rick Perry, the energy secretary. None of them were expected to appear on Wednesday. Mr. Vought and Mr. Brechbuhl were subpoenaed after they failed to appear at depositions last month.

Democrats are rushing to call the last of the witnesses they are seeking to interview as they wrap up the fact-finding phase of their inquiry and move toward public hearings as soon as next week. Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, has indicated he will count refusals to appear as part of an article of impeachment against Mr. Trump for obstruction of Congress.

The lawyer for one key witness disputes another’s account of coffee and cordial chats.

The lawyer for Fiona Hill, a former top White House foreign policy adviser, on Wednesday accused Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, of having fabricated conversations with Ms. Hill during his testimony to impeachment investigators.

Mr. Sondland said that he had a cordial relationship with Ms. Hill, according to a transcript of his testimony released on Tuesday. Mr. Sondland noted several times that he talked with Ms. Hill over coffee, at one point describing her as furious at Mr. Trump and “sort of shaking. She was pretty mad.”

In a tweet, Lee Wolosky, Ms. Hill’s lawyer, said that Mr. Sondland had “fabricated communications with Dr. Hill, none of which were over coffee.” He added that Ms. Hill told Mr. Sondland what she told lawmakers, that “the lack of coordination on Ukraine” was disastrous and that “the circumstances of the dismissal of Amb Yovanovitch shameful.”

Ms. Hill, who left her post at the National Security Council just before Mr. Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine in July, testified last month that she viewed Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier and political donor whom the president awarded with a plum diplomatic post, as a national security risk because he was so unprepared for his job.

She also testified that she and John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, alerted government lawyers after becoming alarmed by a rogue effort to pressure Ukraine by Mr. Sondland and others.

From Tuesday: House Democrats released revised testimony from Sondland and summoned Mulvaney to appear.

Mr. Sondland revised his testimony this week to add that he told Ukrainian officials that military aid was tied to their commitment to investigations President Trump wanted.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Mr. Sondland said in a new four-page sworn statement, which House investigators released along with the transcript of his original testimony.

On Tuesday, impeachment investigators also summoned Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, to appear for a deposition on Friday. Mr. Mulvaney was deeply involved in the alternate Ukraine foreign policy campaign and has been inconsistent in his accounts of the July 25 phone call that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Last month, Mr. Mulvaney acknowledged that the White House had held hostage nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a pledge to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals. He later retracted his statement and is not expected to appear for the deposition.

Trump liked what he read in Kurt Volker’s transcript.

Impeachment investigators on Tuesday released the transcript of Kurt D. Volker’s deposition, and Mr. Trump thanked him on Wednesday for telling investigators that he did not know anything about a quid pro quo.

Mr. Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, was responding to an investigator’s question about the conversations he had with two other witnesses in early September about the quid pro quo with Ukraine. Mr. Volker said he did not have conversations about a quid pro quo because he did not know that there was one.

Mr. Volker resigned in September amid the Ukraine controversy and provided key testimony to investigators, including the detail that he warned Mr. Trump’s private attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that the Biden-Ukraine narrative that he and the president were advancing was not credible weeks before Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine.

Catch up on impeachment: What you need to know

• Mr. 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.

• 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.