19:59

Earlier today we flagged reporting indicating that Tim Morrison, the national security council official testifying currently before the impeachment committees, would back up ambassador Bill Taylor’s account of ambassador Gordon Sondland trying to strike a deal with Ukraine exchanging military aid for an announcement of investigations into Joe Biden and 2016 election tampering.

Timothy Morrison arrives for a closed-door deposition. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Morrison did explicitly corroborate Taylor’s account, according to Morrison’s opening statement, posted online by CBS News: “I can confirm that the substance of his statement, as it relates to conversations he and I had, is accurate,” Morrison testified.

But Morrison does not emerge as a particularly threatening witness for Trump; instead, his testimony threads multiple needles that seem designed to defend Trump in the Ukrainian affair.

Morrison suggests that military aid to Ukraine was withheld owing in part to Trump’s concern about corruption in Ukraine and about Europe not contributing enough. And Morrison suggests that the possibility of a quid pro quo involving military aid with Ukraine was diminished by his perception that Ukraine did not know military aid had been suspended until late August.

Morrison’s perception in this regard does not seem accurate. The New York Times has reported that the Ukrainians were aware of the suspension of aid in early August. In any case, Sondland was explicitly dangling aid to try to extract investigations in early September, in a bilateral meeting in Warsaw, according to Morrison’s own testimony.

Then Morrison floats quite a contention to exculpate the president – that maybe this was all Sondland’s idea? The official said: “I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the Administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.”

Sondland has said through a lawyer that he never mentioned “Biden” in conversations with Ukrainian officials, but instead spoke of Burisma, the gas company that formerly employed Hunter Biden. He has not responded to the notion that the quid pro quo strategy was “exclusively his own.”

Morrison also testified that public summaries of a 25 July call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, which Morrison listened in on, were accurate. He says he went to NSC lawyers after the call, but he says he was not concerned that what Trump said was illegal: instead, Morrison says, he was worried about a “polarized” political reaction, possible confusion in Congress and “how it would affect the Ukrainian perceptions of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship”.

(Morrison was worried that reporting about a call that Ukrainians were on would affect their perceptions of the US-Ukraine relationship? Weren’t those perceptions rather shaped by... being on the call?)

Anyway, Morrison concludes, “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed.”