colonel vindman tell his story, and i ll let the republicans debate themselves any way they want. okay. what about a different line of logic they might use and i think you got a preview of this on sunday. you were on abc news and up basically in a debate with one of your republican colleagues chris stewart who seemed to be suggesting that any u.s. president, it s his prerogative, to investigate corruption wherever he sees it and chris stewart was basically saying this was about corruption. it wasn t about a political motive or a political rival. that s what i hear many republicans saying. what s your plan if they say that today? yeah, look, i mean, i think they re trying to generalize this because they can t handle what the facts are. but of course the white house chief of staff mick mulvaney came out and said what this was about. he told us all what it was about, an investigation of the bidens, and holding up military aid until they got it. the president of the united states has s
meeting. that deliverable was reinforced by the president. the demand was in order to get the white house meeting, they had to deliver an investigation. so zelensky really wanted a white house meeting and of course he wanted those $400 million. here s the moment on july 10th. that s early when vindman puts the pieces together and figured out it is completely apparent to your point, maggie, the republicans it seems like will go after him. the reason we have a preview of that is because senator ron johnson who was involved in lot of ukraine meetings, this was one of his issues sent a letter yesterday to house republicans sort of spelling out his take on all of this and what he suggests without presenting any evidence, i mean, truly baseless claims is that it s possible, he says. he even uses the words it s possible that vindman was somebody who didn t support the president s agenda. right, to be clear i didn t say they re not going to go after vindman. i said they re in a box going aft
still failed to include the specific words burisma and 2016, giuliani said the statement would lack credibility. ambassador volker then added both burisma and 2016 to the draft statement. though they were by late july aware that the security systems have been cut off at the direction of the president and acting white house chief of staff mick mulvaney. as the ukrainians became aware of the suspension of security assistance and that negotiations over the scheduling of the white house meeting between trump and zelensky dragged on, the pressure increased and any pretense that there was no linkage soon dropped away. morrison accompanied vice president pence to warsaw september 1st where pence and zelensky met, and zelensky raise the suspended security assistance. following that meeting, ambassador sondland approached yermak to help him what he believed helped they aid is that the prosecutor general would go to the mic and announced that he was opening the burisma
one of the few people that has spoken to giuliani, the regular channel, all of these other people have feelings and understandings about what giuliani was doing. did he ever tell you that united states aid or a meeting with the president of the united states would not occur for the ukrainians until they agreed to an investigation of burisma, the bidens or the 2016 election? everything i heard of giuliani was his opinion. excellent. so the ukrainians never told you that giuliani told them in order to get a meeting with the president, phone call, military, foreign aid from the united states that they would have to do these investigations? no. mr. morrison, you testified that you spoke to ambassadors to ambassador sondland, and he told you about a conversation he had with the president of president of the united states. on page 128 of his testimony, he
with the ukrainians to dig up dirt for which you call, or what the left calls conspiracy theories. which they are right, they are conspiracy theories and dirt that they dug up to spend their own conspiracy theories to attack the trump campaign in the 2016 election. so i have no more questions for these witnesses. i know our members do. mr. castor, you have a little bit of cleanup there. thank you mr. nunes, i will try to be quick and yield some time back so we don t have to use every last minute. senator volker, your are you aware of the statement from mr. petrenko that he said no one told the ukrainians, certainly not him that there was any linkage between the security assistance funds and investigations? i saw that statement, yes. do you know the foreign minister? i do. during time relevant, did you have any discussions with him about the investigation and links? not about investigations with him, i believe i kept that