this year. the whistle-blower s three main allegations were all corroborated by the rough transcript trump himself himself. trump did have zelensky to investigate joe biden and this due bunked national committee serve er conspiracy theories. sometimes the president will say he s just joking but he dug in his heals when it came to hurricane dorian, the president tweeting in addition to florida, north carolina, georgia and alabama will most likely be hit harder than anticipated. looking at one of the largest hurricanes ever, already category 5. be careful god bless everyone! and then he drew a line on a map to try to demonstrate he was right. i think it notable for trump to refuse to acknowledge he made a mistake. this may have been in error but
sondland was the ambassador to the eu, and i misunderstood you before you were talking. and he said yes, let s not continue this back and forth over texts. said there is no quid pro quo and was explicit about this. but again, it is still going to raise questions about why the aid was being held, what the goal was in getting this statement in front of staff to president zelensky in the hopes that he would actually make a public concession that would then be appeasing to the president and to rudy giuliani. david, i mean, this reporting, does it make it seem like the president s personal political agenda is essentially under pressure being promoted by certain members within the state department, at his urging, including the ambassador to the new ambassador to ukraine? absolutely. the president s pressure for this result is ensnared in now one official after another, one cabinet officer after another. it does go in the state department. i think standing back from today, i must tell y
at the new york times have reporting about the president in the ukraine. what is it? our understanding is there was a draft of a statement that was done by the ambassador of ukraine, gordon sondland, in addition with kurt volker, the state department official who was on the hill today testifying behind closed doors about this whole issue. the statement was presented to staff, to the ukraine president zelensky, as something he could say publicly that they would investigate this company that hunter biden had worked for and commit to investigating what they believed was involvement by the ukraine in the 2016 elections, or what they believed could exist. ultimately the statement was never issued. but it does, again, show a desire to try to bend foreign policy to the president s political needs. and i believe that this is something that came up on the hill today. so this is the the u.s. ambassador who is involved in this, this is the person who replaced the ambassador who had been r
the u.s.-ukrainian relationship. and he was concerned that the politics were really going hurt the relationship. so, he warned them, be careful. you can t be seen as infringing in the election or that s going to be bad for ukraine in the long run. but it sounds like those warnings that he gave giuliani were ignored, and we re just learning, of course you just talked in your previous segment about this new york times story reporting that there was a draft statement that he was part of, where zelensky, the president of ukraine, was actually going to announce this investigation. so, clearly, he lost this battle in trying to get giuliani to sort of back off and try to keep distance from this investigation. right. from my understanding of your reporting that the conversation with zelensky about don t get involved in american politics, that came short i think in early august or after the july the end of july phone call that president trump had. and correct me if i m wrong. and then t