sondland s sort of early morning release of his statement where he said everybody was in on it. i wasn t rogue, i wasn t part of an irregular policy channel. this was the channel. it was run by donald trump, vice president pence and mike pompeo. this was the channel. and then i thought the plate shifted again when fiona hill came in yesterday and said you are doing russia s work for them. do we really think there is no scenario where if john bolton were to sort of find religion and walk in and testify in a senate trial that republicans who have trusted john bolton for decades wouldn t say h-mmm? i think the one variable here is public opinion. we have seen that shifted since, for example, the mueller investigation, it seemed to go on and on, hard to wrap your head around. the last two weeks has painted a fairly clear picture. we are going into a break where we are going to have people and they are not supposed to talk about politics at the thanksgiving table, but i have a feeling tha
it s not fully appreciated. it s often pushed onto emotional issues perhaps or deflected onto other people. and what she was angry about is she thought he had gone rogue. she realizes in part i think from his testimony the day before, right, that he was on an errand from the president. a domestic political errand which was not foreign policy. so, we have a hefty agenda with the ukrainians bilateral agenda that is meant from our perspective to advance our security and our interests and values, a fragile democracy that is building itself toward the west, trying to, and trying to emulate our interests and values, trying to build the rule of law. and that s been taken hostage by a re-election of the u.s. politician. that is contrary, i think she would say, to how our country is supposed to work, how our foreign policy national security decisionmaking is supposed to work, where you re supposed to be advancing the interests of our country.
movement. i think in some ways that overall vision is more important than the individual pieces of evidence because they re damning but they haven t created any movement. michael steele. yeah. i think that last point is the crux to this. i just don t see that movement happening. i think the president and his team very much as we saw with the mueller case have been somewhat successful with creating a narrative in which this is not as important as the democrats. notice during this entire thing, democrats talked about my colleagues, the gentleman across the aisle. republicans emphasized the democrats are doing this, the democrats are doing this. they have politicized this thing down to the point where it is almost meaningless to some voters. and the polling right now is showing people backing off of this idea of moving forward with impeachment. so, there has been some success by what we ve seen in the house
here. when i hear nick say he would take out the word alleged, that means a lot to me. the only defense that this president has ever tried to mount here is the defense that he s a corruption fighter. trump who is anti-corruption. and aside from the fact that that defense is completely laughable for all of the reasons that we know and talk about every day, what really nails it is the fact that if trump wanted to fight corruption in ukraine, he would have kept marie yovanovitch on the job. she was a known corruption fighter. there s no reason to bring in a bumbling rudy giuliani and the three amigos. so every defense that the president has to offer here i think as a criminal case this would be very strong. michael steele and tim miller from the party formerly known as republicans. let me read you from what peggy nuna said.
and the performances that took place over the last couple of weeks. the president spending 53 minutes on fox news this morning. do you have a job, do you work? how do you have 53 minutes on television, right? but that s the point. the most important job is to dumb down the conversation and to drive home the narrative that just as there was no collusion there is still no quid pro quo. do you think anybody believes that? yes. a lot more than we probably want to admit. and you re going to hear a lot of that this thanksgiving dinner around turkey. see, i think they believe it because donald trump said it. i think they don t care. i mean, i don t disagree on the politics. but i actually think this is different. i think that they bought there was no collusion because, as friends of donald trump will tell you privately, they don t think he is smart enough to collude with vladimir putin. but i think everybody thinks that he s dirty enough to have held over the head of a fragile