giulianien demanded that ukrain make a public statement announcing the investigation of the 2016 election the dnc server and burisma. mr. giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the united states and we knew these investigations were important to the president. the president. july 25th call, president zelensky recognized the connection between the meeting and the investigations. he said, i also want to thank yount for your invitation to vit the united states, specifically washington, d.c. on the other hand, ita want to ensure you we ll try to be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation, and the president spoke in that call about the bidens and burisma. the omb ultimately announces the aid was withheld, gives no explanation, and everyone in the intelligence community, all the national security team, all recommended the release of the aid. this was an important ally of the united states, facing an active war with the russians that took part of their
president under theseor circumstances are privileged or should beiv disclosed. that case would be expedited in the courts, wouldn t take that long but democrats said they don t have time for that. why? because they promised their base an impeachment by christmas. this is i absurd. it should be noted by the way that president trump has consistly t cooperated with congress in fulfilling the oversight investigation responsibilities here over 25 administration officials that testified before oversight committee this year, 20 before this committee, at the start of the impeachment inquiry the white house s produced more tha 100,000 pages of documents to the oversight committee and he also quickly declassified and produced to everyone the call transcript. democrats know this c is an absd charge about obstruction and the truth is in the history of the republic there s never been a single partyee fraudulent impeachment process deployed against a president like the one used against donald trump.
concerned about ukraine he released aid in 2017 and 2018, why in 2019, after the department of defense cleared ukraine on be charges of corruption, why then did he decide he was so concerned about corruption that he was not going to release aid? because the evidence i m sorry. i m not yielding. i am not yielding. the gentleman has the time. they got a new president. that s why. the gentle lady has the time. people will not interrupt. they got a new president not proper here. thank you, mr. chairman. they got a new president who was known to be an be anti-corruption fighter. if you want to argue that the president was so concerned about corruption at that particular moment, you have to look at the whole record of u.s. policy and our agreement that the department of defense would look
remained in n,place. in fact, the professionals testified about them trying to figure out how is it possible it s legal to hold this aid because the certifications happened, there s no basis to hold it other than the president ordered it. it s not about corruption. it was about extracting a commitment to announce publicly that they were launching an investigation of president trump s chief p political rivala smear against vice president biden. so this notion that really what happened iss the president jus satisfied himself, that mr. zelensky was forf, real, is nonsense. betrayed by all of the evidence collectedp let me give you some of it or remind you because you apparently don t remember it. ambassador sondland testified, underst oath, mr. giuliani s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging ats white house visit for president zelensky. mr. giulianit demanded that ukraine, mr. giuliani, the president s counsel, mr.
heck yeah our country had been through a lot and the president was tibd and wanted to find out what was going on. that s very legitimate working on behalf of the american people. as i said last night, you guys don t respect the 63 million people who voted for this guy that s why the speaker of the house called the president an imposter. that s what s wrong. us a d like you to do favor because our country has been through a lot. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. for what y purpose does mr. johnson seek recognition? move to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. i just want to slow this down and be methodical about it because most of us here are attorneys and in this case, we re supposed to be finders of fact. we re supposed to carefully and objectively analyze the claims against the record. so let s do that. there are two articles to this impeachment resolution, of course, abuse of power and obstruction of justice. on the first, democrats know there isst zero