The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: Latest Updates – The New York Times

The request came from three Democratic committee leaders guiding the inquiry: Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee; Representative Eliot L. Engel, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, the acting chairwoman of the Oversight and Reform Committee.

“These documents include information central to the inquiry’s core area of investigation: the president’s efforts to press Ukraine to initiate investigations that would benefit his personal and political interests, and not the national interest,” the three Democrats wrote.

In keeping with confidentiality rules around the investigation, the three Democrats did not specifically identify the documents in question, but they appeared to match descriptions of records referred to in recent days by key witnesses.

On Tuesday, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, told the committees that he kept detailed notes of his time in Kiev that allowed him to recreate a damning portrait of events in his testimony. He also referred to memos, including a June 30 account of his conversation with the Ukrainian president, that could provide new avenues of investigation for Democrats if they get their hands on them. He also mentioned a late-August cable he composed “describing the ‘folly’ I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active.”

A lawyer for Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, indicated before his deposition with investigators that he had produced communications and other records to the State Department that he hoped would be handed over to investigators. They were not.

Another former State Department official told investigators that one of his former colleagues, George Kent, had written a memo documenting an early October meeting with a State Department lawyer about how to respond to the impeachment inquiry that had alarmed him.

The Democrats did not put a due date on their request, and for now have chosen not to issue a subpoena. The State Department defied an earlier, broader subpoena to the State Department for a swath of potential records related to the case. But it may be more difficult for the department to justify this more narrow request, particularly given the political pressure created by the testimony from Mr. Taylor, Mr. Sondland and others.
— Nicholas Fandos