out corruption. yes, and engle is saying no it is not. and did the president violate any laws, because according to just security, and here is the quote, the very act of holding the money in the first place could have also violated the impoundment control act. and where does that come into play here? the republicans are putting up a process defense here. they have created this notion of a quid pro quo, and there is no legal requirement for quid pro quo, and i would argue that the commentators are trying to misdirect this all. and the best example here is article ii of the nixon articles of impeachment, and article ii says that the president abused his power by using fbi and the irs to investigate his political opponents. period. that is exactly what president trump was trying to do here. he was trying to get, use the power of his office, phone calls from, phone calls from the west
the halls of congress. if they do what they know is right, the president lights them up on twitter and they lose a primary election. very sadly, unlike the nixon or clinton investigations, this is going to continue to break down along partisan lines. listening to that and listening to what john just said, have democrats lost hope on getting bipartisan support? i think that was a really big focus for them before the information about the ukraine call and the wide-ranging conspiracy surrounding pressure on ukraine really emerged. at that point i think democrats said, look, we need to focus on how the president clearly abused his office here for his own political gain, regardless of whether or not we get any republican buy-in because this is about the constitution. this is about holding a president accountable for his actions. if the republicans don t want to come on board with that, then they re going to have to answer to their voters for that in 2020. it remains to be seen how much
vindman. if he did, he would have done so already. he has used that telltale dodzes of times in office. i want to ask you these same questions. why does the president continue saying things that are demonstrably lies, they are false? look, you re a republican strategi strategist. is he appealing to republicans thinking they will believe him and not look at the proof that comes time after time after time and potentially in open hearings? does he think that what he says, that is, again, demonstrably false, will weigh more heavily with republicans as they vote? well, i don t think he has to think i think the facts are there. look at the polling. the guy still remains incredibly popular within the republican party. i think the mistake donald trump is making, however, is not paying attention to independents. let s not talk about the left. we know where they are.
questions of the whistle-blower, and, so betsy, why have the republicans not taken the attorney up on the offer or have they? do we know? so, i don t have reporting of whether or not the republicans have offered questions to the whistle-blower s lawyer, but i can tell you that at this point the republicans are less interested in the actual information of the whistle-blower may or may not have and more interested in the whistle-blower s credibility as someone who described the activity that unfolded. republicans have seen the report and the report is public and everyone got the read it. they want to be able to argue that because the whistle-blower, they will allege is sort of infected by political bias, and again, no evidence of that, but the republicans will argue, that and they want to argue that because he is allegedly affected by political bias he or she is not a reliable narrator and therefore the entire impeachment inquiry the fruit of the poisoned tree.
question that chris wallace asked this morning is when it is going to be tough for the democrats to answer going forward. and the other big challenge for democrats is that right now all of the house republicans are on the record saying that based on the facts that are currently publicly available, they don t believe it makes sense to move forward with impeaching the president, and what that means is that democrats are if they want to get new republicans on board with their effort and if they want to have any shot of removing the president which would require republican support have to present new fact, and moving the inquiry rapidly will come at the expense of doing a massively thorough investigation, but what we have already seen is that charlie cupperman, a senior national security official is probably not going to testify in this inquiry, and he sued and a federal judge said that the judge won t come down on the ruling whether or not he has to testify, and probably until much