can t hear a word you re saying. so, what we have to look at are the actions that were taking place in the context of this phone call. with e know that by the time this phone call had taken place, the aid had already been withheld. people at the omb say it came at the order of the president. and the ukrainians understood this this aid was being withheld. they were on the brink of actually making this announcement under duress, presumably bill tailor s opening statement when he testified states that he had to actually confirm, call them and make sure they weren t going to make this announcement he was so concerned about it. so, you don t have to have the words right out of his mouth. we very rarely have people you know, the president does confess to crimes, but in this case we don t need him to confess to crimes because there s a lot of context taking place in addition to what he s saying. but if you re going to want to make it an attempted prescribe, you want to tie it as
out in clear detail how this whole scheme worked for the president and rudy giuliani were demanding investigations to be uh-uh nounced by ukraine, that could help trump in his re-election effort in order to pressure ukraine to handing those investigations over, to announcing those investigations, the core elements of american foreign policy towards that country were put on the line. things like a white house meeting for their new president, even military assistance that had been ordered by law, by congress. bill taylor is the first one who laid that out in detail and crucialry told the impeachment committees that he takes copious contemporaneous notes and had documentation to back up a lot of what it said. well, today the intelligence committee released more than 300 pages of verbatim testimony from bill tailor, from his closed door deposition several weeks ago. they also simultaneously announced that bill taylor will be a witness at the first public hearing of the impeachment
security council. and tim morrisson that backed up bill tailor s testimony that there was a quid pro quo. that happened on the same day that we saw the first full house probe. amy stodder is joining us and jason johnson, and a senior political correspondent at the hill. now that the resolution has passed, how do they play this? they re going to try to avoid corey lewendowski moments. they have a simple path forward. there is a scandal act them
president trump intervened to personally insist that military aid and white house meetings be denied to ukraine until they coughed up investigations that could help president trump and his domestic politics to the extent that bill tailor s testimony last week was the nail in the coffin or the first nail in the coffin for the impeachment proceedings, this today was direct corroboration that taylor was telling the truth and that there are other witnesses who will put their names to sworn statements where they back him up. and i will say the drama here is just kind of beginning. for one thing, taylor says that he is willing to testify in a public hearing if the congressional impeachment committees want him to. i ll tell you also that both of these people who testified today, christopher anderson who testified about the white house blocking condemnation for russia for what russia did to the ukrainian ships and sailors a year ago, christopher anderson and croft who backed up taylor, both of
notice. taylor testified, quote, i and others sat in astonishment. the ukrainians were fighting the russians and counted on not only the training and weapons but also the assurance of u.s. support. all that the omb staff person said was that this directive to withhold the military aid had come from the president. so, that was bill tailor s very dramatic testimony. today he got back up. today catherine croft corroborated that directly and basically entirely. this was her testimony today. she said, quote, on july 18th, same date that tayloride identified, i participated in a video conference where an omb representative reported that the white house chief of staff had placed an informal hold on security assistance to ukraine. the only reason given was that the order came at the direction of the president. so, to extent that bill tailor s testimony last week that