ukraine is fortunate for our national security and we should support. not not to provide that would be folly. did you get an answer to your cable? not directly. no, sir. do you know what happened to it? secretary kent secretary kent, do you know what happened to it? tells me that i was on vacation, on vacation when his cable came in but my understanding is it made to its recipient secretary pompeo. we know secretary pompeo was on the call a month earlier july 25th. not like he s on the dark about any of this. what did he do with is? i honestly can t say for sure what happened with the cable once the message was brought in at the highest level. one other question, gentlemen. on september 1st you wall a meeting between the vice president and the president of ukraine, mr. zelensky, in which right off the bat the president of ukraine raises security assistance, and the vice president according to your
learned congress would inevitably learn about the cl t complaint. less than 48 hours later that the military aid would be released. over the weeks to come or over the days to come, rather, we will hear from other dedicated public servants. other aspects of this effort to invite foreign interference in our election to condition a white house meeting and military aid for the performance of political favors for the president s re-election campaign. we will hear from other witnesses. i appreciate members on both sides of the aisle who i think participated today in a serious way, and in a civil way. this is as it should be. there is no shortage of strong feelings about what this means to the country. at the end of the day we re going to have to decide based on the evidence that you and others provide whether we re prepared
let me ask you. how did this go in terms of the case the democrats are clearly trying to build in favor of impeachment? was it is a devastating day? or was it mixed? what do you think? the first thing that strikes me in hearing the, the proceeding today is that the framers vested the house and the senate with authority over impeachment thinking that the members of congress would be more sophisticated than typical jurors. doesn t matter what evidence is hearsay or anything else. framer s assumption, members of congress should be sophisticated enough to put the evidence together. second thing that strikes me is a lot of what we didn t hear is really significant. already pointed out. probably can t be stressed enough. there are a lot of people not being allowed to testify. a lot of people that have been numerous subpoenas, that have been not complied with at direction of the president. why does he not want those people to speak? it may well be that they can
country but like we said in the floor today, facts will not change. the transcript speaks for itself. there was no conditionality or quid pro quo in the transcript. the two guys on the call have been very clear, no pressure, no pushing, no linkage to investigations in both president zelensky and president trump have said and of course president zelensky didn t pledge to do any investigations prior to the aid being released ant the kaerns didn t know the aid was on hold at the time of the call. the first two witnesses, neither one of them has talked to the president, talked to chief of staff mulvaney or talked with mayor giuliani. and as i said with ambassador taylor, he had three meetings with president zelensky and all three meetings never once did this idea of linking security assistance dollars to an investigation ever come up. and of course we know what president zelensky said.