all bolton s behavior was this is bad. unless a drug deal this is not something he call it s a crime. this is not a small thing. like john bolton exercising all of the things that he s most famous for besides his ideology. he is a knife fighter. he sees things he doesn t like. he sees things that are not in his interest or he thinks are not in america s interest and he figures out a way to play the inside game to cut those things off. this is a guy who knows how to get that stuff done. a, he failed here and that tells you that the president was unmovable on this because he was unable. john bolton s unable to get this thing stopped, that means the president really wanted it to happen. john bolton is saying this is really bad, not like kind of bad. like drug deal bad. drug deal bad. for conservatives like drug deals about as bad as anything you could do. not soft drugs either. this is not like a marijuana
the base doesn t give far enough in these races, especially off year races. they will crawl over broken glass to vote against his guy. and in the louisiana race in particular, bound himself to trump. he ran putting a sticker, a trump sticker on his truck. you know, that was his big claim to fame. and, you know, once in a while, it works out for a guy like dy santos in florida. the suburbs are trending more blue even in louisiana and it s a contrast to how donald trump is motivating democratic voters now. he s motivating republicans to vote against him versus just two years ago in the alabama special election when at that time, a visit from trump was worth five points and an immediate bump and that s just not the case right now. to be a fly on the wall when people have to walk in and say, oh, yeah, no, they don t want you there. that s not going to go well.
bolton shut that meeting down, subsequently referred to a drug deal between sondland and mulvaney and instructed her and others to report their concerns to a white house lawyer. so i would just note that in addition to bolton being someone who has first-hand knowledge of all these discussions both with sondland and with the president, mulvaney is someone who s really emerged here as someone who was not only the recipient of the president s directive in july to put the hold on the ukraine aid but was subsequently in conversations and on emails with sondland in which they were discussing this push for investigations. you know, elise, what s so extraordinary about this scandal is it s a cone that goes like this with trump at the top and then you don t get too far below trump before, as rebecca is saying, they are calling rudy a hand grenade. it s literally the guy right under trump, john bolton, his national security adviser who says i don t want anything to do with this. so the alarm g
between sondland and donald trump that was played over a cell phone at a restaurant in ukraine. two more witnesses or at least one more witness has corroborated that. you ve got the email evidence that rebecca and her colleagues have reported on. what is the picture coming into focus around sondland? well, it s going to be really interesting to see which way his testimony breaks. he is obviously somebody who has been reluctant to totally, you know, rip the lid off of this scandal. he wants to not necessarily implicate the president, even in his clarification he made pains to say that it was his presumption that there was a quid pro quo in place that he hadn t actually heard that explicitly from the president. he also said in that testimony that he only spoke with the president about five or six times. he made no mention in that testimony about the july 26th phone call which seems a pretty pregnant omission from that testimony. i suspect he will have to clarify that.
standard the voters have a right to vote on this the ballot box in november of 2020. this is bad. there is no question it s bad but it s not all that bad and we should give voters a chance to work their will in november. they can impeach him at the ballot box. i think that is what they will say. and i don t think it s what they want it to be the standard under which a president can do henceforth that will this kind of behavior now be condoned, acceptable, a thing that there is a green light for, to behave in the way that donald trump just behaves, only probably more competently and able to pull it off where is trump was unable to pull it off. i think a few of them will do this sort of fake, you know, my integrity is offended, i can t believe the president did this, however, judges, however majority. and i think the only thing that