to the extent you ve confirmed it isn t anything different than happened on the 7/25 call, agreed, from the president s with 20/20 hindsight now that we ve had the transcript of the call, the bidens were clearly mentioned on the call but i wasn t making the connection with the bidens. right, but with regard to the president, it was just mentioning investigations. that s all he said on the phone was investigations, i think. but you told us time and again that you never realized the bidens were part of any of this, burisma and you talked about a continuum and you never came to understand that until maybe as late as september 25th. i don t know the exact date but it was pretty late. and ambassador volker said the bidens never came up after his one breakfast meeting with mayor giuliani where he testified that he tried to disabuse the mayor of anything relating to the bidens. and i think secretary perry
all the discussions with rudy giuliani, that you never put burisma together with the bidens? i didn t. and i wasn t paying attention to what mr. giuliani was saying on tv. we were talking to him directly. let me ask you this. ambassador volker testified yesterday to a similar epiphany, for lack of a better word. this is what he said. in hindsight, i now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption with the ukrainian company burisma as equivalent to investigating former president biden. i saw them as being different, the former being unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable. i should have seen it differently and had i done so, i would have raised my own objections. does that sumse up your views a well? it does.t
biden investigation and burisma/2016 election investigation, is that right? yes. youn, say, hopefully that wi break the logjam. at this point you knew that the security assistance had been on hold for five weeks, is that right? i became aware on the 18th of july. and you understood there was a lot of activity within the state department and elsewhere to try to get that hold lifted, is that right? that s right. just about everybody in the interagency, meeting the national security apparatus, wanted to lift the hold and wanted the aid to go to ukraine? correct. so what did you mean here when you said, logjam? ja well, as i said to chairma schiff, i meant inclusively anything that was holding up the meeting and the ukraine/u.s. relationship. and what was holding that up? at that point it was the
i think i referenced i didn t say ukraine had to do the investigations. i think i said we heard from mr. giuliani that that was the case. so that helped inform your presumption, correct? correct. so that wasn t really a presumption, you heard it from mr. giuliani. not about the aid. i heard about the burisma 2016. and as we discussed, two plus two equals four, the aid was there as well? that was the problem, mr. goldman. no one told me directly that the aid was tied to anything. i was presuming it was. right. well, i want to go ahead to i want to go back on september 1st. i m going to jump actually ahead to september 7th, okay, when we discussed those text messages where you said there were multiple convos with president zelensky with potus. do you recall that? do you have the email by any
statements aboutnt burisma and e 2016 election. but what was being held up? the aid was being held up, obviously. four days later you said in your opening statement that you sentur rudy giuliani s contact information to john bolton, is that right? i did. did you know why he asked for that? no idea. did you know that he was going to ukraine the next day? i knew he was about to go to ukraine. i didn t know exactly when his tripdi was. but i thought it was kind ofip odd w request given that the whe house can pretty much getgi anyone s phoneuc number they wa. now, in this email to secretary pompeo you reference a tripet to warsaw. ultimately the vice president went on that trip? that s correct. and that was the conversation that you talked about, or you testified earlier to, where you said that we really need to get these investigations from ukraine in order toro release t aid in the pre-meeting? that s right. and vice president pence just