i ll reserve it. the gentleman reserves an objection. he wants to see it. that s fair. thaler seek? i move to strike the last word and yield to my friend and colleague from florida. i thank the gentleman for yielding. i just got to come back to this interview with yermack because it s like the tree that fell in the forest that nobody heard that completely demolished the entire democratic case. they have no evidence that the ukrainians ever knew that this aid was withheld. so they re literally trying to prosecute an impeachment against the president for a shakedown when the alleged people being shook down, one, said they felt no pressure, and two, did not even know it was happening. time and again you heard them in debate, in press conferences and the whole circus show that s going on here say, well, we ve got this testimony from gordan
elections by dragging in foreign interference. it s the highest of high crimes and misdemeanors. our framers spoke about this abuse of power, abusing the office of the presidency to advance your own personal interests and to undermine the public interest. i ll yield to mr. rasken. i yield to mr. rasken. thank you very much. just to flesh out the detail from what the gentleman from right si rd rd w rhode island, one of the depositions was with someone who was with gordan sondland who testified there was a quid pro quo but he saw him on the phone with president trump and he reported right at that time to him. he said the president doesn t give a blank about ukraine. he s interested in the big stuff. what s the big stuff? whatever can benefit him. the gentleman yields back.
the case is, well, even if zelensky didn t know there was pressure, there s this other guy, yermack, and yermack knew from gordan sondland that there was pressure, but the same day that they introduced their articles of impeachment, yermack gives this interview with time magazine and says, and i quote, gordon and i were never alone together. we bumped each each other as i was walking out and i remember everything. we talked about how well the meeting went. that is all we talked about. so here they are with no crime, with no victim, with no witnesses, with no knowledge of any shakedown, and yet they proceed. to accept the democrats theory of the case, you got to believe that the ukrainians are lying to us, when they say there s no conditionality, no pressure, nothing wrong, that they re so weak and so dependent on the united states that we can t believe a word they say. again, where were you during the obama administration when this
figure out how is it possible it s legal to hold this aid, because the certification happened and there s no basis to hold it other than the president ordered it. so it s not about corruption. it was about extracting a commitment to announce publicly that they were launching an investigation of president trump s chief political rival, a smear against vice president biden. so this notion that really what happened is the president just satisfied himself that mr. zelensky was for real is nonsense and betrayed by all the evidence collected. let me remind you of it because you apparently don t remember it. ambassador sondland testified under oath, mr. giuliani s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a white house visit for president zelensky. mr. giuliani demanded that ukraine mr. giuliani by the way, the president s counsel. he demanded that ukraine make a public statement announcing the
an associate who s been indicted in my hometown of chicago. so this is the type of problem that you see when our foreign policy gets colko commandeered other purposes and that s why this whole series of incidents and wrongdoing is so serious. testimony from marie yovanovitch, from bill taylor, from fiona hill and others who would know because they worked in that world of foreign policy testified that rudy giuliani had undo influence. they talked about what happened with gordan sondland. they talked about john bolton, saying that rudy giuliani is cooking up something. it s clear that the people who would think that there s somebody in their space who s exercising influence over the president and foreign policy, to them it represented a shadow foreign policy mechanism or structure. the republican response that you and i talked about briefly that came out last night finds that