incident here. if you look at turkey and this president, there is a broader aperture here. there is turkey purchasing the russian missile system, which should have automatically triggered sanctions. then the president calls gop senators to the oval office and says, give me flexibility. those sanctions were never implemented. okay. there s by the way, the the sanctions that he announced today that he pulled back. now, he s pulling them back. they were implemented for six days. right. right. see how effective he is? this goes back to the lindsey graham conundrum. as he sits there and tries to, you know, figure out what to do with this. this ship has sailed. this decision has been made. there s how do you now as putin and erdogan are carving up syria, the united states thinks it s going to walk into that conversation and change the nature of it. i just and that s what i asked corker. i said how do you undo this? and he said i ll tell you the truth, you don t. everyth
and ambassador taylor was extremely clear, extremely chronological and detail-oriented. and i think he filled in a lot of meat around some of the comments that the chief of staff had said or that ambassador sondland had said previously. it was it was powerful. you found him to be very credible? oh, sure. yeah. as was dr. hill and george kent. these are just professional diplomats. they don t i don t know that they have agendas. they have their agenda is to pursue american foreign policy as dictated by the state department. 30 of your republican colleagues sort of stormed the hearing room today. claiming that this process hasn t been fair. what would you say to them if you could? if they asked you how s the process been? you re in the room, you know how the process works. part of why i m probably not really cut out for this line of work is i m not real theatrical. you know? i just want to get the facts and make a good decision. especially, something as important as this. i
this through an ideological prism? well, i don t know. i would like to see more people focus on the facts. and i ve heard a few more people talk about that. but it s not really serving the president well not to get the facts out there and let the facts stand. jonah goldberg who was with national review, he wrote, you know, he looked at the pressure that you guys successfully put on the president on the doral decision. and he basically wondered what if more republicans had stood up to the president in the first year? would everybody be in a better place? the party and the president? what would you say? well, i don t know. there weren t that many things in the first year that i think i disagreed with him on. i mean, basically, we were consumed by trying to replace the aca with better insurance. it took the whole year to to come up to the point of failure unfortunately. uh-huh. but you don t feel as if there was missed opportunities in the
the outside. you know, you just sort of said, you know what? enough. whether it was a decision not to run again. you seem to be very frustrated by washington. well, as a businessman, washington s going to clearly frustrate most anybody. but the reason i said i wasn t going to run again is i said from day one, three terms maximum. i m 66 years old. i m not going for a new career. but i ammed want to run to get money and we ve accomplished those in two terms instead of three. so i think it s time to move on and i started thinking about it the very day we passed the offshore moratorium bill. but as far as this situation here now, i just can t take an ideological position without facts. i ve got to know the facts and i m going to pursue that in all fronts before i have to get to the point perhaps of making a very critical decision that affects our country and our institutions. it s interesting. you called it you have to look at it instead of making an ideological decision. how many o
past. i mean, obviously pressure can work with the president if you apply it. yeah, i don t know. he s pretty strong guy. he s done a lot of things in his life. but i would say this. i would say we ve had this rash of problems lately. the doral decision was probably made in haste and not appropriate. the syria move, i m much against. i think we ve made a huge tactical error there to the benefit of russia and unfortunately iran as well. can i ask you do you lump ukraine and syria together since their foreign policy priorities of russia and does it at all strike you as odd that these are the two biggest problems it seems your wing of the republican party has with this president? well, no. i think they re totally different situations. i mean, the problem with the ukraine is that by some, i think, weak foreign policy during the obama administration, russia just came in there and had their way. i m not sure that would have happened under ronald reagan or