grounds that talks about trees ing and bribery be admitted for the record. you what? be made part of our record. majority report without objection. mr. deutsch. getting back to the facts surrounding the president s abuse of power surrounding the white house meeting as leverage for helping his political campaign. mr. goldman, president trump offered ukrainian president zelensky a meeting in the white house. but first he wanted investigations into the bidens on a conspiracy theory about meddling in the 2016 election. president trump worked to exchange official actions for personal benefit, and i want to talk about that. on may 23rd, 2019 a delegation of officials returned from zelensky s nomination and briefed the president. president trump directed government officials to work with his personal lawyer, isn t that correct? yes. and trump s handpicked
direction of president trump, who had also directed him to contact mr. giuliani. so that meeting is actually quite important to that investigation. and sir, you already explained that on may 23rd, the offici only thing they said was talk to rudy. he was taking his official people of ukraine and handing them over to rudy giuliani so they could work with him on issues he was focused on in reference to the tweet. is that fair? i agree that s what that shows, that the july 23rd meeting he put ukraine matters with ambassador sondland and perry and told them to meet with rudy. in the next few months, that s what happened at the president s
mr. goldman, my republican colleagues have suggested there is no direct evidence. is that true? no. there is a lot of direct evidence and a lot of the evidence that they say is hearsay is actually not hearsay. indeed, it is not true. now i don t want to relive a law school evidence class, instead i would like to go over some examples with you and please tell me if they are direct or indirect evidence. ambassador sondland and mr. volker both testified that on may 23rd, 2019, president trump told him to, quote, talk to rudy about ukraine. is that direct evidence? yes, technically. well not technically. but yes. thank you. and then we have the memorandum of the july 25th call between president trump and president zelensky, is that direct evidence? yes. that is. so there is direct evidence that president trump asked president zelensky to look into
yermak says they believe the embassy was keeping information from them. another interesting thing mr. yermak says in that article, is that he recounts, the meeting with sondland, which has become very significant apparently. the meeting, he says, mr. yermak speaks english. but it s not his first language. he does not recall the meeting which happened on the way to an escalator after the meeting with the vice president. he recalls it very differently, the question and the facts of what happened between ambassador sondland remain in dispute.
with these are some of the attorneys involved can i ask you a question? you ve been a veteran of the hill investigators for 15 years. this is crazy, i ve never seen anything like this, you haven t either. would it be interesting to note, because mr. goldman chooses not to answer, because he doesn t want to incriminate himself or the chairman or anyone else. would it be interesting to you to find as you ve dealt with committee staff for a long time, someone to have an epiphany, or were they understand direction by somebody to do that? they were trying to figure something out. that s it. one last i m getting ready to try to i have one thing for mr. goldman. we re used to committees and people and witnesses taking gratuitous shots at people they don t like. earlier today in your testimony you made a comment that goes to an interesting thing, and i ll go back to the chairman questioning motives. in your testimony, you said, as you were discussing mr. sound