URGENT – Diplomat says he told Ukraine that aid was conditioned on announcing investigation in new testimony

(CNN) — US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland amended his previous closed-door testimony with House impeachment investigators to say that he told a top Ukrainian political aide that the release of US security aid was conditioned on Ukraine publicly announcing an investigation that would help President Donald Trump politically. Sondland’s attorney sent the committee a letter and a three-page addition to his testimony, which said he had remembered a conversation on September 1 with Andriy Yermak, an aide to the Ukrainian President, linking the aid to the investigations. “I now recall speaking individually with Mr. Yermak, where I said resumption of U. S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland said. Sondland’s new testimony, which was included in the public release of his closed-door deposition transcript on Tuesday, adds to Democrats’ evidence that the President connected the freezing of $400 million in US security aid to Ukraine to investigations into the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden.