A senior US diplomat loyal to Donald Trump has revised his evidence to investigators for the impeachment inquiry into the president.
Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, admitted he knew about the Trump administration’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine.
He had previously said he did not know about a scheme to use US foreign policy to advance the US leader's political interests. But Mr Sondland has now changed his stance after saying he has been refreshed by statements from other key witnesses.
The stunning reversal handed House impeachment investigators another key piece of corroborating testimony.
He acknowledged what Democrats said was a clear quid pro quo with Ukraine, pushed by President Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Mr Sondland, in an addendum to his sworn earlier testimony, said that military assistance to the East European ally was being withheld until Ukraine's new president agreed to release a statement about fighting corruption as Trump wanted.
The diplomat knows that proposed arrangement to be a fact, he said, because he was the one who carried the message to a Ukrainian official on the side-lines of a conference in Warsaw with Vice President Mike Pence.
"I said that resumption of US aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks," Sondland recalled.
His update was released by House investigators as Democrats prepared to push the closed-door sessions to public hearings as soon as next week.
Mr Trump has denied any quid pro quo, but Democrats say there is a singular narrative developing since the president's July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy when he first asked for "a favour."
That request, which sparked the impeachment inquiry, included a public investigation into Ukrainian activities by Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden and his son and Trump's allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election.
Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said the House panels conducting the inquiry are releasing the word-by-word transcripts of the past weeks' closed-door hearings so the American public can decide for themselves.
"This is about more than just one call," Schiff wrote in an op-ed in USA Today.
"We now know that the call was just one piece of a larger operation to redirect our foreign policy to benefit Donald Trump's personal and political interests, not the national interest."
Pushing back, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said the transcripts "show there is even less evidence for this illegitimate impeachment sham than previously thought."
