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A Russia expert testified that a top diplomat said President Trump was behind his pushing the Ukrainian president to announce investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden.

Timothy Morrison, a former deputy assistant to the president and the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia, described a Sept. 7 phone call where he says U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon S ondland said “the President told him there was no quid pro quo, but President Zelensky had to do it and he should want to do it.”

Morrison testified behind closed doors that Sondland, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was helping lead a “second track” of U.S. foreign policy than the one being carried out by former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Chargé d’Affaires for Ukraine William Taylor, and others at the State Department and elsewhere within the Trump administration.

Morrison said he became aware of the hold on U.S. military aid to Ukraine by July 15, with Ukraine becoming aware of the hold by Sept. 1 and raising the issue with Vice President Mike Pence. Sondland was pushing Zelensky’s top aide Andriy Yermak to have Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, stemming from the younger Biden’s lucrative position on its board.

“He told me that in his — that what he communicated was that he believed the — what could help them move the aid was if the prosecutor general would to go to the mic and announce that he was opening the Burisma investigation,” Morrison said of Sondland.

And the former NSC member said Sondland was doing this at Trump’s behest.

“In the context of what I understood to be the parallel process, Ambassador Sondland believed and at least related to me that the President was giving him instruction,” Morrison said, later adding, “He related to me he was acting — he was discussing these matters with the President.”

This may contradict Sondland’s own congressional testimony.

“I recall no discussions with any State Department or White House official about former Vice President Biden or his son,” Sondland said. “Nor do I recall taking part in any effort to encourage an investigation into the Bidens.”

On Friday, David Holmes, the counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, recounted a conversation he’d overheard between Sondland and Trump in July.

Holmes claimed he heard “President Trump ask, ‘So, he’s going to do the investigation?’ Ambassador Sondland replied, ‘He’s going to do it,’ adding that ‘President Zelensky will do anything you ask of him.’”

The House Intelligence Committee released Morrison’s Oct. 31 testimony Saturday. Morrison resigned from his post the same day he testified.

Morrison also listened in on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, which formed the central part of the intelligence community whistleblower complaint sparking the Democrat-led impeachment investigation. He thought the call could be “damaging” if its contents were leaked, and testified he immediately spoke with lawyers on the NSC, asking them to review the call, and said NSC Legal Adviser John Eisenberg then made the decision to move the call transcript to a highly classified server, which he characterized as a “mistake” which hadn’t been fixed as of late September.

In the call, immediately after Zelensky expressed interest in purchasing anti-tank weaponry known as Javelins from the United States, Trump asked Zelesnky “to do us a favor though” and to look into CrowdStrike and any possible Ukrainian election interference in 2016. The president also urged Zelensky to investigate “the other thing,” referring to allegations of corruption related to Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump told Zelensky to speak with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.

Morrison said Sondland briefed Trump about the call before it happened, and said then-national security adviser John Bolton later advised him to report any issues to lawyers. He also said some information was coming second-hand from Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia.

“She mentioned Rudy — and I should say clearly for the record that, in some cases, I consider Burisma to sort of be a bucket of issues,” Morrison said. “Burisma is Burisma the company, Burisma is Hunter Biden on the board, and I sometimes lump together Burisma and the 2016 server in my head, chiefly because they are all issues I tried to stay away from.”

“It did not — it was nothing a part of any — the proper policy process that I was involved in on Ukraine, it had nothing to do with the issues that the interagency was working on,” Morrison said.

Morrison will testify in public Tuesday. The release of the testimony from Morrison on Saturday coincided with the release of the closed-door deposition of Jennifer Williams, who will also testify publicly Tuesday.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, William Taylor, and fired Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified this week in the first public impeachment hearings.

Next week, the National Security Council’s Ukraine expert Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Kurt Volker, Gordon Sondland, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs Laura Cooper, undersecretary of state for political affairs David Hale, and Fiona Hill will testify in public too.