WASHINGTON - Key impeachment witnesses said Thursday it was clear that Donald Trump´s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was pursuing political investigations of Democrats in Ukraine. Their testimony undercuts the president´s argument he only wanted to root out Ukrainian corruption.State Department official David Holmes said he understood that Giuliani´s push to investigate `Burisma,` the Ukraine gas company where Joe Biden´s son Hunter served on the board, was code for the former vice-president and his family. Former White House adviser Fiona Hill warned that Giuliani had been making `explosive` and `incendiary` claims.`He was clearly pushing forward issues and ideas that would, you know, probably come back to haunt us and in fact,` Hill testified. `I think that´s where we are today.`Testimony from Hill and Holmes capped an intense week in the historic inquiry.The House probe focuses on allegations that Trump sought investigations of Joe Biden and his son - and the discredited idea that Ukraine rather than Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election - in return for U.S. military aid that Ukraine needed to fend off Russian aggression, and for a White House visit the new Ukrainian president wanted that would demonstrate his backing from the West.Hill a former White House Russia analyst, sternly warned Republican lawmakers - and implicitly Trump - to quit pushing the `fictional` Ukraine-interference narrative as they defend Trump in the impeachment inquiry.Holmes, a late addition to the schedule, testified that he came forward after overhearing Trump ask about `investigations` during a `colorful` phone call with Ambassador Gordon Sondland at a Kyiv restaurant this summer.Holmes said he realized his firsthand account of what he heard would be relevant.`Those events potentially bore on the question of whether the president did, in fact, have knowledge that those senior officials were using the levers of our diplomatic power` to push Ukraine to investigate his rivals, he ...
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