. sure. a central issue as you alluded to is whether withholding this was part of his broader extortion campaign that he was engaged in. what mark sandy can help explain, why were career officials cut out of the process? what exactly was the white house trying to hide? this is something we have seen time and time again in this impeachment inquiry. honest career officials are pushed aside so they don t impede corruption. we saw last week how it was going on at the state department. mark sandy can explain the office of management and budget at the white house. you worked with him. we see the tension between him and michael duffy, the political appointee in the office of management and budget. what can you tell us about mark sandy either specifically, him as an individual, be or the role that he was playing in that department. i ll just say that he had an excellent reputation within omg. and in general he would be the person that normally would sign
extortion campaign. so we didn t talk about the details of sondland and volker s communications during that meeting. at what point basically, senator johnson s basic argument is the following. this should be a political discussion and a political argument and a political debate. he s not alone in thinking that. and that s not just a partisan defense. there are some in the middle watching this show going i don t like what he did, but it s too close to the election. what do you say? let me tell you why this is different. the president was trying to use the power of his office to influence the upcoming election. he was attempting to get a foreign power to destroy a candidate for office who was running against him in 2020. and so this is directly relevant to the sanctity of american elections. if you don t stop a president from trying to rig an upcoming election, then i don t know how we live in a democracy anymore. that s why you had to use this means right now. i notice you used
off on a request of this kind. to be clear, when i say request of this kind, there aren t many requests that come down from the united states saying, hey, i would like to extort a foreign power to interfere in upcoming elections. but the legal manner in which this hold was actually placed, that is done by a career official. it is a ministerial action that deals with how funding is meted out over the course of time. a political step-in raises serious questions. what exactly was going on? why couldn t they justify what they were trying to do? it speaks to the fact that there was underlying corruption there. this wasn t for political reasons. that is part of the broader extortion campaign. it is something you wrote about for just security, the website. talking about the tools that congress has to dig into this and get an understanding of what s been happening here. now that you have seen him testify, where this investigation is headed, is it doing all it can or are there
through those lawyers, yes, he did go to ukraine with lev for that meeting in early may and, yes, there was a discussion in russian over coffee at a cafe in kiev between him and lev and a guy from the ukrainian government. he concedes all of that but says that, no, none of these threats were delivered, not at least the way that lev characterizes them. and, again, i mean, who are you going to believe? who do you believe do you believe anybody who asserts anything in the middle of this scandal? i mean, trying to sort out competing claims among associates of president trump and his lawyers is like trying to hold on to your lunch money at a pickpocket convention without a money belt. good luck. hope you had something stashed in your sock because anything that was in your pockets is going to be gone. so, i don t know whether we should believe these guys and their competing claims as to what exactly they were doing in this extortion campaign and when and who was delivering what message,