According to excerpts of his testimony, former special representative Kurt Volker advised the Ukrainians to drop a proposed public statement after learning that the Justice Department had not requested investigations into Burisma or the 2016 election — despite what Rudy Giuliani was promoting.
“It died. I mean, no one—once we started seeing a tempo of engagement with Ukraine, we had first the sense that Rudy was not going to be convinced that it meant anything, and, therefore, convey a positive message to the President if it didn’t say Burisma and 2016. I agreed with the Ukrainians they shouldn’t do it, and in fact told them just drop it, wait till you have your own prosecutor general in place. Let’s work on substantive issues like this, security assistance and all. Let’s just do that. So we dropped it,” Volker said.
Some background: President Trump has repeatedly claimed that former vice president Joe Biden had called for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was "investigating his son." There is no evidence Hunter Biden was ever under investigation. The investigation was into the business dealings of the owner of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors.
US Ambassador to the European Union, in a text message to Volker, had proposed that the Ukrainians put out a statement “about Ukraine’s commitment to fighting corruption and investigating things that happened in the past,” in the words of Volker.
“(That) was where we had this question that we discussed earlier about whether it would specifically mention Burisma and 2016 or not,” Volker said.
Volker testified that the statement went through various iterations, and that Giuliani wanted it to specifically mention Burisma and 2016.
Volker said Zelensky aide Yermak Andrey Yermak asked him “whether any request had ever been made by the US to investigate election interference in 2016. Volker discovered that the DOJ had not requested investigations that were being promoted by Giuliani, so he said he advised the Ukrainians not to include it in the statement.