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But Mr. Morrison, a Trump political appointee and a former longtime Republican congressional aide, resisted making the kind of sweeping, often damaging judgments about what was taking place that Democrats have heard from other witnesses, and Republicans emerged calling him the most favorable witness they had heard from so far.

In his opening remarks, obtained by The New York Times, he did not draw conclusions about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the pressure tactics, pointing back repeatedly to Mr. Sondland, whose involvement in Ukraine policy he said he “did not understand.” In subsequent testimony, he said he did not view the July phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky as illegal or improper, but he found it striking enough to ask the National Security Council’s chief lawyer, John Eisenberg, to review it, in part out of a concern that a summary might leak out.

He did so, Mr. Morrison testified, because he worried about how disclosure of what was said in the call “would play out in Washington’s polarized environment,” how it could affect bipartisan backing for Ukraine in Congress, and “how it would affect the Ukrainian perceptions of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.”

Rather than ascribe a political motive to the pressure campaign against Ukraine, as some witnesses have, Mr. Morrison characterized the behavior he saw as bad foreign policy of the sort that could potentially squander a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” afforded by the election of Mr. Zelensky, who campaigned as a reformer who would crack down on rampant corruption.

“Ambassador Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the public release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my Sept. 1, 2019, conversation with Ambassador Sondland,” Mr. Morrison said. “Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by the leaders of the administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.”