During Trump's first impeachment in late 2019, State officials testified that Hunter Biden's acceptance of a job at Burisma at a time when his father was vice president created the appearance of a conflict of interest but did not materially impact U.S. policy in Ukraine.

But in a private, classified email, one of the top U.S. officials in the Kyiv embassy told then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch that Hunter Biden had, in fact, impacted the U.S. anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.

"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules," embassy official George Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016