ukrainian territory since the start of this war, since the invasion, he is surprised something like this hasn t happened yet. here we are in november, eight months in. but again, they re approaching this very cautiously. as they should. christiane, you were just there on the ground in ukraine. and as jim points out, this has long been a u.s. fear that this war potentially could spill over beyond ukraine s borders and bring in some of america s nato allies. what s your assessment? well, i ve been talking to obviously quite a few people. we ve had attempts to figure out what s going on from many of the surrounding and neighboring officials who reregularly interview on the program. and basically to a person, they are all saying the same thing right now, that this is a time when we just have to find out exactly what happened before we decide what we re going to do next. to that end, if poland does invoke article 4, which the
and that s a huge source of frustration. because they ve been able to pretty adeptly been able to control what gets out and what doesn t get out for at least in a public setting from people of who left. and a lot of that is done through fee of. on axios hbo last week, mitt romney was talking about how a lot of people don t speak out, how almost nobody in the senate speaks out because they do worry that they re going to get primaried. they worry that it could end up costing conservatives any control in governance. that s been a powerful motivator to keep republicans silent. that s where this new ship, we don t know what will happen with impeachment proceedings or what will happen in terms of the trial in the senate, but we do know that for the first time there s a lot of stuff getting aired publicly that wasn t before. and so this really is a different chapter. and, eugene, as jim points out, this is first hand stuff in the is somebody who s in the room with donald trump and it adds t
start with what clarissa reported, joe, if the ukrainians are not going to put out their verbatim transcript of this conversation then it s very hard to trust actually what the white house has put out. they don t have the best record with transparency and the fact that, as jim points out, this was a five-page summary of what we understand to be a 30-minute phone call, of course it just raises the question of what are we missing? what have they expunged and hiding in the other computer network that is not supposed to be designed to store conversations like this but was. now what? i think that s what investigation and what adam schiff is going to be leading, because if you believe the reporting around this, and there s no reason not to, there has to be an e-mail record of people talking about, you know, did you hear what the president said and why it was moved from the normal server to another server. so i think they will try to you know, there is no audio copy of this tape, but they
or may not have included in the investigation. i m not getting into that any further. democrats who were counting oun mueller to move the ball forward, didn t get exactly what they wanted today. here s the thing. as jim points out. what s really important here is what mueller said and not how he said it. what mueller said was that the trump campaign welcomed russia s election interference. lied to cover it up. the trump campaign officials built their strategy the messaging strategy around the stolen documents? generally that s true. and lied today cover it up? generally that s true. he said the president was not exonerated of obstruction. the president is repeatedly
and calling it opposition research. so those are some of the things that the president did not refer to, but he s trying to just zero in there on that little bit of information where he said, yes, i would call the fbi and i would also take the information. back to you. as you say there, he contradicted himself because yesterday he said he wouldn t call the fbi, now he says he would call the fbi. i suppose folks at home have to figure out what they believe. joe surgeons, thanks very much. jim, it s a new day, it s a new day and a new explanation, i suppose on that. yeah. wow. all right. so joining us to discuss, former presidential adviser to four presidents, david gergen, and former federal prosecutor and cnn legal analyst jennifer rodgers. good morning to you both. good morning. david gergen, you know, i don t the president is saying i don t care what don mcgahn said, you know, i hired him, but i don t care what he said, and, by the way, he was only saying it to make h