ukraine, marie yovanovitch ousted in may by donald trump who would later tell the president of ukraine, quote, she is going to go through some things. with the bombshell in today s proceedings came from trump himself when he attacked yovanovitch anew. it was another smear against a veteran diplomat who served the united states for more than 30 years under six presidents four of them republicans. and while we don t need to dignify the president s invective by repeating it or showing it here, we want to highlight its impact and its response. here s marie yovanovitch s realtime reaction. the president implicitly threatened you in that call record. and now the president realtime is attacking you. what effect do you think that has on other witnesses willingness to come forward and expose wrongdoing? well, it s very intimidating.
witnesses who could exonerate him, who were directly in communication with him, like mick mulvaney or john bolton, he should allow them to come testify. the fact that he s blocking them from testifying, i think, means that they can t help him. if, by the end of this, the testimony that s scheduled so far, if there has not been a breakthrough moment or an a-ha moment for a lot of people, could you foresee an extension in which you wait to go through the courts to see if you can get bolton to testify? because bolton does seem to have direct knowledge. no. the a-ha moment is really the presidential call record where ambassador taylor said this, he d never seen a president do anything like this before, ask a foreign government to investigate a political opponent. you know, we have john dean here today and he would, you know, tell you that much of watergate was about the cover-up. here, the actual underlying act, you know, the shakedown, $391 million of u.s. taxpayer dollars, that s muc
and democrat, calling their senators, i think to say i care about this. one of the refrains from the republicans, obviously, has been and was today, look, this is essentially a hearsay or you heard somebody say this, or you heard multiple people and that you re interpreting what they said, it s how you feel about something. it s not the president of the united states said to you face-to-face. well, the president s call record, the transcript, is an admission by the president. that would be admitted in any court of law as an admission by the person saying it. in that call record, the president does not say, i m interested in corruption, does not mention the company, burisma. he goes right at biden. he says biden a number of times. he say,s, i have a favor to ask though. but these witnesses, they were carrying out the wishes of the president s agents in ambassador sondland, rudy giuliani and mick mulvaney. so those folks directly worked with president trump. george kent and ambassado
described as this simple story of holding up military aid for the corrupt demand of dirt on political rivals? the president s call record confirms that he was asking the president of ukraine to investigate his political opponent. that s not really in dispute. but i think ambassador taylor describing being on the eastern front of this war in ukraine and that this is a matter of life and death, and as he said undoubtedly more ukrainians would die if security assistance was not given to them. that puts it in perspective that the president of the united states, for the most selfish reasons, his own personal interest in a re-election bid is holding up aid for the ukraines and that people are actually dying because that aid is not coming through. i think for a lot of americans the reality of what this means in a human nature perspective is just really starting to set in. the republicans seem to trot out a lot of trial balloons. but one of them was obviously
trying to question the voracity of witnesses who weren t in the room with donald trump. do you see any sort of exposure in terms of the case that you ve built with the more than dozen witnesses that you have so far? and will there be a renewed effort to get people like mick mulvaney and john bolton in front of your committee? well, they would also then have to question the voracity of the president s own call record where he never misrepresentations the words corruption never says burisma but does say biden. and he says that a number of times. while these witnesses did not hear designately from donald trump, they heard from other agents like ambassador sondland, like kurt volker who was working with rudy giuliani. no single witness is going to show what the shakedown scheme is. it s going to take multiple witnesses and that presidential call record. but tlifrps a very good place to start. congressman and then to your question on mulvaney and bolton.