trump who approached ukraine. the russia investigation examined a lot of contacts 150 contacts mostly among aides and advisers with the russians. in this instance what is public facing is trump and rudy giuliani driving a ukrainian oppo operation in the russia investigation the mueller report sites donald trump jr. s ignorance of the laws and accepting foreign aid. post mueller, the whole country is educated in the illegality of election interference. the russia investigation he was a candidate. now with ukraine trump is the american president has the of the presidency. in the question from the russia probe, as annie karni just said about a quid pro quo with military aid. we ve seen this movie before. trump tried to bully the ukrainians into messing with our democracy. he tried to get a foreign national to help him when election to the oval office.
pressing ukrainian president zelensky to dig up what he believed would be damaging information about one of his leading democratic challengers. and that is where we start today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. with us from the new york times white house correspondent annie karni. now an adviser to the biden campaign. with us at the table former democratic senator clara mccaskill. former federal prosecutor paul butler. former oh, david jolly didn t make it but he s still up here if he shows up. and chief public affairs officer karine jean-pierre. annie karni, let me start with you. donald trump seeming to confirm everything that your newspaper and the washington post and the wall street journal has reported since friday basically that donald trump called the code red. donald trump asked the ukrainians to investigate joe biden. i mean, he hasn t issued a firm denial of any of it. he tweeted about the wall street journal had reported
else that congress is taking them to court on. because this statute is pretty clear. what you would have to decide is the statute protects the president even if he s behaving with criminal behavior. joe biden called late friday for the transcripts, all the transcripts to be released of donald trump s conversations with the ukrainians, which we know to be from annie karni s colleagues reporting at the center of the whistleblower complaint. that which caused as claire said, urgent concern from the trump-appointed i.c. intelligence community, i.g., inspector general. what else can biden do? does biden still have bipartisan relationships in the u.s. senate to call on the senate intelligence committee or foreign relations community to demand some more transparency? well, look. i think vice president biden s doing what he can do, which is speaking out and making clear what went wrong. look, it s up to congress to decide if it s going to fulfill its constitutional
president or his family that caused a conflict of interest and vice president biden behaved in a way that was inconsistent with the way leaders ought to operate, i think the american people deserve to know that. what i do find is inappropriate is the fact that vice president biden at the time s son did very significant business dealings in ukraine. i for one find that to be concerning. and to me that s the issue perhaps that should be further investigated. annie karni, just a stunning donald trump likes to call his gop primary opponents the three stooges, rudy, mnuchin and pompeo seem like a better fit. but what do you make of the fact that he s using the week of unga, his secretary of state to sort of puppet these ub substantiated allegations against a potential 2020 opponent? well, one thing. i mean, if this white house has not been, you know, organized enough to send out talkers or talking points to the administration officials going out on the issues in a long
a donald trump. so they put a remedy in the constitution so that someone like a donald trump could be stopped. and it s just absurd that congress is not acting. this is not a popularity contest. this is not a beauty pageant. we are talking about their constitutional duty. we have donald trump who truly believes he is above the law, period, full stop. he s obstructing congress. he is obstructing justice. and nothing he s not going to stop unless congress steps up and stops him. one thing that was remarkable, annie karni, this weekend, is the way he s turned the entire cabinet into his personal propaganda machine. i think we re all conditioned to see rudy giuliani on cable news making these out landish claims getting ahead of the michael cohen hush money scheme for the porn store, throwing sand in the gears of the mueller probe. but it was startling to see the country s treasury and secretary of state echoing rudy s message. let s watch. if it s the case that there was something goin