Transcripts for CNN Anderson Cooper 360 20191114 01:21:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
reporter: that s right, anderson. i talked to a white house official just a short while ago who said this revelation from bill taylor that one of his aides overheard the president talking about investigations with the eu ambassador, gordon sondland, that that really caught them off guard over here at the white house and in the words of this white house official, the overheard call was a surprise to everyone. so they are certainly trying to get to the bottom of that. you heard the president say that it didn t happen, but, of course, sets up the possibility that you could have this aide come in there, david holmes, has been identified by cnn as the aide in question here, who could come in and testify and essentially contradict the president. would be another administration official contradicting the president that he was involved in some sort of quid pro quo here. even if the president didn t watch today s hearing, as he claims, which, you know, normally he does watch a lot of tv, he
i ll get that later. dylan! but the one thing we could both agree on was getting geico to help with homeowners insurance. what? switching and saving was really easy! i love you! what? sweetie! hands off the glass. ugh!! call geico and see how easy saving on homeowners and condo insurance can be. i love her! all right. first battle today was over the worth of these witnesses, taylor and kent. and to be honest, they were credible, consistent, nonpartisan in their appraisal. they were strong enough that this salvo by representative jordan you didn t listen in on president trump s call and president zelensky s call? i did not. you never talked with chief of staff mulvaney? and you re their star witness. you re their first witness. it was rude and it was echoed by other trump defenders and it was absurd every time. no one puts their most important
depends whether he revises his testimony again. he s done it once beforet. the president has relied on a number of things that common sense tell you shouldn t be relied on as much as they are. for example, the president keeps relying on the fact that president zelensky said, hey, there s no pressure. meanwhile we know in the real world that victims of extortion in the presence of the extortionist on whom they still rely in front of the cameras deny being extorted. the same might be true of sondland. sondland gets asked the question i don t think i think it s crazy and there s a text exchange with bill taylor, i think it s crazy conditioning this on that. five hours go by and sondland writes back, i think you ve completely mischaracterized the position of the president s efforts. you know what would make my argument more salable for the republicans is if the president said look, what i did was wrong,
people s vote for donald j. trump in 2016? me? it s not my job. you re making assumptions of everything that president trump did. no, no assumptions only based on the record. there s nothing in the record you can make the assumption of saying there s quid pro quo committed. yes, i can. it was an attempted bribe. you haven t answered why the aid was held up. it wasn t held up. you haven t answered why they kept telling the ukrainians you won t get the aid until you give them the bidens. the ukrainians didn t even know their aid was held up. they knew, they just didn t know then. they knew and they were concerned enough about it to reach out to our own representative to ask about it. the president of ukraine put out there they didn t even know. why did they go to vindman? why did they go to vindman, the liaison and say how do we do this? ambassador taylor said they wasn t aware of it and that he didn t even know it was held up