will serve as the narrative backbone for the articles of impeachment the House Judiciary Committee will now prepare and on which members will vote. In this post, we try to distill from thousands of pages of the record what that story really is.

To be precise, while the voluminous testimony is still an incomplete record that is missing nearly the entirety of the documentary material produced in the White House and the relevant agencies and the testimony of key witnesses like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney, it actually tells a number of different stories. One is about Ukraine itself, as seen through the eyes of the American diplomats and policy analysts who interface with the country: its struggle to defend itself against Russia, its battle with corruption, and itsa specific story of the development of conditionality regarding a White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. What began as a mere hostility on the part of Trump toward Ukraine, and an unsubstantiated conviction that the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election, came to involve demands to investigate that theory. And it came as well to involve demands that the Ukrainians investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his connection to the Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, on whose board the younger Biden sat. Those demands, over the course of the summer, came to be linked to the desire of the new Ukrainian government for a White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump. In the live testimony, far more than in the depositions that