be credible, none of this stuff happened in the way that they said. as all of that was happening, the president stood in front of the cameras yesterday and did it again and made the same request of china. like the thing that they had been trying to say wasn't happening happened on live television. >> yeah, the general assumption in washington, you know, the president is a pretty masterful strategist. so you can never quite know. the general consensus in washington is what the president was trying to do is to take the stigma away from this. in effect to say -- to normalize it, if you will and say some people are saying i did this in secret, in a classified phone call with president zelensky. i'm going to do it on the south lawn of the white house with all the cameras rolling. so in effect he's saying, i'm not hiding this. i own this. to try to shift the argument from did he do it to is it okay