david, let s start with you. volker. he changed his story from original testimony. was it did it make sense his new story? no. a lot didn t make sense except in the context of a guy trying to clean up his record to stay outfront trouble aout of trou- it doesn t pass the smell test you don t remember this key moment that everybody else remembers in a meeting where somebody says something inappropriate and your boss says the meeting is over. now that i have heard i do remember something. he was saying he didn t initially understand the biden connection. you re talking about a guy who has been around public life for decades. and diplomacy. at a high level.
volker. he worked with sondland to get ukraine to investigate burisma, the energy company where joe biden s son, hunter, sat on the board. but volker said, at the time, he didn t see the biden connection. in hindsight, i now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the ukrainian company burisma as equivalent to investigating former vice president biden. i saw them as very different. reporter: volker testified, bottom line, the investigations president trump wanted were not in the national interest of the united states. i don t think that raising 2016 elections or vice president biden or these these things i consider to be conspiracy theories that had been circulated by the ukrainians, particularly the former prosecutor general, are they re not things that we should be pursuing as part of our national security strategy with ukraine. mary bruce with us live on capitol hill. a very long day, mary. you were on the air with us all
the smear campaign also included allegations related to ukraine s interference in the 2016 election and the burisma/biden connection, is that right? yes. so i m going to end my questioning where we were before which was the july 25th call. president trump not only insults you and praises the corrupt prosecutor general but he also as you know by now references these two investigations. first, immediately after president zelensky thanks president trump for his quote great support in the area of defense, unquote, president trump responds i would like you to do us a favor, though. because our country has been through a lot and ukraine knows a lot about it. i would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with ukraine. they say crowd strike. i guess you have one of your
testimony about a continuum. how the demand increased over time. and he said it kept getting more insidious as the timeline went on. he details that in his testimony. sondland, he s going to go down in history for these two words. call me. this gets to his credibility problem. they asked sondland, what did you mean by that? i m more of a face-to-face guy. problem is he s texting all over the place. the reason he s not texting here is he doesn t want an electronic record of this. he said i knew about burisma but i didn t know there was a biden connection. and of course he had to supplement his testimony for the wee important detail that, oh, there was a quid pro quo. so he s a credibility mess. sort of cuts both ways. so taylor and marie yovanovitch, they are going to be the public witnesses next week. what does she got? marie yovanovitch has this cloak and dagger tale about how she was pushed out as ambassador to the ukraine.
he is not looking to bust corruption, generally all he wants is an investigation into 2016 and into brees ma and the bidens. sondland i think has real credibility issues. if i m thinking about him as a potential witness or investigator i d think twice. a couple things that don t ring true. he said i heard about bris ma but i didn t think there was a biden connection. both witnesses said he knew, we talked about it. he also said sondland said nobody ever shared their miss gings with me, vindman, taylor and others have said, no, there was plenty of concern raised to sondland. he say i just like to talk to people one-on-one, that s my style. there have been a number of other witnesses in some cases have provided explosive testimony. there have been other important witnesses. dr. fiona hill one of the top white house russia advisers talked about this shadow diplomacy, this group led by rudy and perry and sondland.