WASHINGTON (AP) - Eight witnesses. Five hearings. Three days.
The Trump impeachment inquiry is charging into a crucial week as Americans hear from some of the witnesses closest to the White House in back-to-back-to-back live sessions.
Among them, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the wealthy donor whose routine boasting about his proximity to Donald Trump is now bringing the investigation to the president's doorstep.
The witnesses are testifying under penalty of perjury, and Sondland already has had to amend his earlier account amid contradicting testimony from other current and former U.S. officials. White House insiders, including an Army officer and a former National Security Council aide, will launch the week's hearings today.
It's a pivotal time as the House's historic inquiry accelerates and deepens. Democrats said Trump demanded Ukraine investigate his Democratic rivals in return for U.S. military aid it needed to resist Russian aggression, and that may be grounds for removing the 45th president. Trump said he did no such thing and the Democrats are just out to get him any way they can.
On Monday, Trump said he was considering an invitation from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to provide his own account to the House, possibly by submitting written testimony. That would be an unprecedented moment in this constitutional showdown between the two branches of U.S. government.
Trump tweeted: "Even though I did nothing wrong, and don't like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!"
Today's sessions at the House Intelligence Committee will start with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer at the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, his counterpart at Vice President Mike Pence's office.
Both are foreign policy experts who listened as Trump spoke July 25 with the newly elected Ukraine president. A government whistleblower's complaint about the call led the House to launch the impeachment investigation.
Vindman and Williams said they were uneasy as Trump talked to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy about investigations of potential 2020 political rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Vindman reported the call to NSC lawyers. Williams found it "unusual" and inserted the White House's readout of it in Pence's briefing book.
"I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen," said Vindman, a wounded Iraq War veteran. He said there was "no doubt" what Trump wanted.
Pence's role remains unclear. "I just don't know if he read it," Williams testified in a closed-door House interview.
Vindman also lodged concerns about Sondland. He relayed details from an explosive July 10 meeting at the White House when the ambassador pushed visiting Ukraine officials for the investigations Trump wanted.
"He was talking about the 2016 elections and an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma," Vindman testified, referring to the gas company in Ukraine where Hunter Biden served on the board.
Burisma is what Tim Morrison, a former official at the National Security Council, who will testify later Tuesday referred to as a "bucket of issues" - the Bidens, Democrats, investigations - he had tried to "stay away" from.
Along with former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, their accounts further complicate Sondland's testimony and characterize Trump as more central to the action.
Sondland met with a Zelenskiy aide on the sidelines of a Sept. 1 gathering in Warsaw, and Morrison, who was watching the encounter from across the room, testified the ambassador told him moments later he pushed the Ukrainian for the Burisma investigation as a way for Ukraine to gain access to the military funds.
Volker provided investigators with a package of text messages with Sondland and another diplomat, William Taylor, the charge d'affaires in Ukraine, who grew alarmed at the linkage of the investigations to the aid.
Taylor, who testified publicly last week, called that "crazy."
The president wants to see a robust defense by his GOP allies on Capitol Hill, but so far they have offered a changing strategy as the fast-moving probe spills into public view.