News from overnight:

Ukraine’s parliament on December 3 passed a law that revamps the State Bureau of Investigations (DBR) on the same day that authorities detained a close associate of the corruption-fighting agency’s chief for demanding a $150,000 bribe from a construction company.

Good morning!

We are now closing the live blog for today, but before we go here's an item from our news desk on the draft report issued today by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. It's pretty safe to assume that this story will be updated regularly in the coming hours, so you can keep abreast of what's happening in both Congress and Ukraine here. We'll be back again tomorrow morning as usual to follow all the latest developments.

House Intelligence Committee Concludes Trump Abused Power Of Office

The Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee has concluded that President Donald Trump abused his power of office by pressuring a foreign government to investigate his political opponent.

The committee The committee led by Representative Adam Schiff (Democrat-California) announced its decision in a detailed draft report published December 3 following a two-month-long impeachment inquiry that included testimony from current and former top U.S. officials and envoys.

"The evidence is clear that President Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. These investigations were designed to benefit his 2020 presidential reelection campaign," the committee said in a statement.

The committee is scheduled to meet later on December 3 to vote on its findings.

The matter will then go to the House Judiciary Committee, which will open its proceedings on December 4.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham dismissed both the report and the Schiff investigation.

"At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump," she said.

If the full House eventually votes to approve formal impeachment charges, a trial would be held in the Republican-led U.S. Senate, where a two-thirds majority of those present would be required to convict and remove Trump from office.

With reporting by Reuters