that was not enough to impeach. in this case, we have the president s statement, which is which is pretty damning in itself. we have a lot of corroborating witnesses. we have people who were on the call. we have direct evidence. we have both testimony and documents. and then we had every single republican senator support the idea of an impeachment inquiry, which is which is much different than what we had in the first instance. are you expecting there to be bipartisan, potentially bipartisan support for impeachment? or potentially republicans who will vote to remove him? because as of now, the scenario still reads the same where republicans vote to keep him in office. and then impeachment or failed removal could potentially be the number one topic in the 2020 election. well, what i i am saying is that the difference here is direct evidence of the president s misconduct. his wrongdoing, his criminal activity. we did not have that before. so so you re right.
plan on getting this done before 2020. there is a lot to do and if you don t mind, i m just going to read off what we know so far and you tell me if we re leaving something out. 11 other witness transcripts have yet to be released. two are scheduled to be released tomorrow. i guess they re going to come in pairs. for the coming days. those additional close door testimony scheduled, some witnesses are ignoring that those subpoenas. public testimony in the house intelligence committee. judiciary committee deliberation on potential articles. december ruling on kupperman on whether or not he has to appear before the committee. full house vote on potential articles if it comes to that. and then of course it goes to the senate. do you think this is going to happen before 2020? well, i think there s a range of possibilities. and there are some witnesses out there that are sort of on the bubble. i can think of national security advisor bolton. he agre if he agreed to come forward, i
false claims that their account is wrong. he s also smearing one of his own national security advisors and all of this is happening as four white house officials today defied subpoenas to testify. there is a lot going on. so let us get the latest from our team of reporters. jeff bennett is on capitol hill. and hallie jackson is at the white house along with josh lederman who is in our washington bureau. he recently returned from a reporting trip in ukraine. jeff bepnnett, let s start with you. today, a couple transcripts were released. how are republicans responding to these transcripts? are they so claiming that these this testimony is being released selectively? you you are hearing that. jim jordan, who is on the house oversight committee, raised a number of questions about why these two transcripts today and why are we getting the ones from sondland and volker tomorrow? house democrats, for their part, haven t really given us a good answer as to why they have chosen to release
and real patriots in my my my opinion. why are the transcripts only being released in pairs? and why are we did we get mckinley and yovanovitch today when they were not the first witnesses? well, they were among the group of first witnesses and i think they provide a context, especially yovanovitch. i think it provides a context to what was going on with with former mayor giuliani acting on behalf of the president. that whole the context of her threatened removal if she didn t get on board with with, you know, the program to defend the president s conduct. so i i think it s important to lay out the context and the the more i think impactful testimony will come later. so are you are you saying you re basically building a case, an argument, by releasing the testimony in a certain order?
volker, former ambassador to ukraine. he appeared before lawmakers yesterday. how will his testimony likely impact president trump s defense going forward? well, we don t know exactly what he said, of course, because it was behind closed doors. in the house intelligence committee. we got starkly different reports. republicans in the house saying he didn t do anything to advance the narrative, the democrats say about collusion or corruption or leaning on the ukrainians improperly. house democrats said the exact opposite. nane and a ha nane, nine and a half hours is an awful long time to be testifying and you got to think he said something to give democrats ammunition to keep going with this. we just don t flow right now. speaking of the impeachment inquiry, as it gets ramped up, talk us to about mitch mcconnell here for a moment and what position does he find himself in with senators on one hand coming out defending the whistle-blower a little bit and leader mccarthy saying the impe