crane undertook certain investigations. bolton abruptly ended the meeting and said that he would not be part of whatever drug deal sondland and mulvaney can cooking up. undeterred, slond brougondland e delegation to the white house and said that they needed to investigation xwae burisma. vindman went to the top lawyer to report the matter. he was told to report in the future with any concerns. he would soon find the need to do so. a week later on july 18th, representative of the office of management and budget announced on a video conference call that mulvaney at trump s direction was freezing nearly $400 million in military assistance to ukraine which was appropriated by congress and enjoyed the support of the entirety of the u.s. national security establishment.
president zelensky, did you prepare talking points for the president to use during that call? yes, i did. and did those talking points include rooting out corruption in ukraine? yes. that was something the president was supposed to raise in the conversation with president zelensky? those were the recommended talking points that were cleared through the nsc staff for the president, yes. did you listen in on that call? yes, i did. the white house has now released the record of that call. did president trump ever mention corruption in the april 21st call? to the best of my recollection, he did not. on april 21st call, president trump told president zelensky that he would send a high-level u.s. delegation to
committee may ask me about. on april 21 zelensky won the ukrainian presidential election. on april 23 the vice president called to congratulate president elect zelensky. during the call, which i participated in, the vice president accepted an invitation to attend president elect zelensky s upcoming inauguration providing the scheduling worked out. the vice president had only a narrow window of availability at the end of may and the ukrainian parliament would not meet to set a date for the inauguration until after may 14th. as a result, we did not expect to know whether the vice president would be could attend until may 14th at the earliest and we made only preliminary trip preparations in early may. on may 13th an assistant to the vice president s chief of staff called and informed me that president trump had decided that the vice president would not attend the inauguration in ukraine. she did not provide any further
democrats pushing ukraine to support some of their efforts it would weaken support from republicans and they want ukraine to be above politics. i just want to two other quick points if i may. one is that ken starr said it is premature and will hurd said that in the preceding moments. it should be done by the f.b.i. and justice department. the whistleblower complaint went to the justice department and said there is no crime or foul here which is why the whistleblower complaint was brought by the inspector general to the intelligence committee and second this question of president trump who laid out the possibility he was going to testify. i would think that would be akin to prince andrew testifying about his relationship with jeffrey epstein which one critic said was like an airplane crashing into an oil tanker causing a tsunami that set off a nuclear explosion. entertaining thing and got us all talking but my guess is it s not going to happen. if it did it would be a very
if president trump did not mention it in that april 21st phone call, is that right? certainly. he also did not mention it in the july 25th phone call, is that right? correct. so even though it was included in his talking points for the april 21st call and presumably even though you can t talk about it for the july 21st call it was not included in either, is that right? for the april 21st call. you didn t mention it in either, rather. correct. when the president says now that he held up security assistance because he was concerned about rooting out corruption in ukraine, that concern was not expressed in the two phone conversations that he had with president zelensky earlier this year, is that right? correct. now, ms. williams, you testified earlier that after this april 21st call president