A top Democratic official said the witnesses — William B. Taylor Jr., the top diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a senior State Department official — would lay out a timeline of serious misconduct by Mr. Trump and describe how the president sought to “bribe, extort, condition or coerce” the leader of another country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity without authorization to publicly describe internal strategy, but the language echoed the definition in the Constitution of behavior that warrants impeachment and removal from office.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, promised that the two witnesses, who still serve in Mr. Trump’s administration, will reveal the president’s actions to be “a corrupt undertaking that is evident from his own words.”
In a taste of the epic partisan battle to come, Republicans readied their arguments that the president did nothing wrong — and certainly nothing impeachable — and raged against a process they have denounced from the beginning as unfair and illegitimate.
“We want to make sure the truth gets out,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader. “There is no reason for the president to be in this impeachment.”House investigators have spent seven weeks methodically assembling evidence through closed-door interviews that Mr. Trump used security aid as leverage to force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and debunked claims that Democrats conspired with Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 election.