fell out of the economy and people are trying to figure out how to sustain it isn t the beginning of the pandemic when the entire economy shut down. look at country spending incredible amount of money in the middle of page that china caused. now on the back of that the unemployment rate is in the mid 5s. the g.d.p. grew at staggering rate. you can t take a bow president biden on one hand and say it s an emergency to restructure the country on the other. who is going to be the republican that comes in next and says i m going to get rid of pre-k. i m going to get rid of elder. i m going to get rid of free lunches or free junior college? it s politically toxic to do stuff like that. take it away once it s given. that s the hope. bernie sanders was a back venture that couldn t comb his hair that people ignored in the lunchroom. now is he driving the agenda for the country. nobody elected him president even the democrats rejected it but somehow joe biden took his agenda and thinks we want i
he says i want a judge to tell me if i need to testify. now he pulls it back and says, i m not going to testify. he had this press conference a few weeks ago where he admitted to the quid pro quo. that set off alarm bells within the white house, saying why would you do this, why would you undercut the strategy and the message we ve been putting forward? now it sounds like he s concerned about whether or not he should be complying with this subpoena, even though he and the white house counsel have said this whole process is illegitimate and there is no reason white house officials should be participating and some of his underlings have not been participating, so it is a legal strategy leaving a lot of people scratching their heads and there is a lot of question about the president s standing because of that. he s certainly listening to the president here after hesitating. he s listening to the president now. we ll see when we come back. more on this story. including, the three diplo
president. there is a linkage there for sure. there are no republican witnesses who can say they spoke directly with president trump and that he did not hold up the aid because of these investigations. there is no credible explanation as to why the aid was held up. mick mulvaney is not testifying, no one is saying we held up the aid for xyz reasons that are not connected to these politically motivated reasons, and no one in the state department, in the defense department as we ve seen from these witnesses knew why the aid was being held up. so there are no sort of alibi witnesses for the president. it will make it harder for the republicans to make their case that all these people just came up with this lack of direct connection with the president and came up with why this aid was being held up and they are all wrong. they can t disprove what these diplomats said in private. the problem for the democrats is can they prove without mick mulvaney or the lmv, half the people the white
you can find it at cnn.com, you can find it at other news organizations. read it. you can fact check this yourself, you don t have to trust me. however, it is a strategy to make it just about the july 25 call. there were things before, things weeks after, too, and you get a strategy, but you can poke holes in that strategy quickly. one, ukraine didn t know. how can you have a quid pro quo if ukraine didn t know? this is laura cooper, her transcript was released yesterday, deputy defense secretary. i knew from my kurt volker conversation and also from sort of the alarm bells that were coming from ambassador taylor and his team that the ukranians who knew about this. their goal is to keep the republicans. impeachment is critical. democrats feel they can impeach the president in the house and not suffer in the electorate. the republican goal was have no republicans defect.
you also had an 18-page memo from republican staff, from the three committees investigating impeachment, that they gave to members that really laid out probably the most robust defense of the president you ve seen up to this point. there were many holes in it and a lot of areas democrats would quibble with, but in that defense are a couple key points, and they really focus on that july 25th call between president trump and president zelensky, saying in that call there was no evidence of any pressure, there was no evidence of any conditionality by what president trump was saying. and that was backed up by what both president trump and president zelensky said in the wake of that call, that there was no quid pro quo from it. also they were not aware that the u.s. security aid had been withheld or suspended at that point. the hold on it was eventually lifted, on september 11. the background of why that occurred, that s not really addressed in the memo. but you re seeing the idea that no on