on the basis of your reporting, do people inside the administration lookiatric perry and see someone who is dangerous to the president? or do they think that rick perry is kind of still under the president s control? first of all they don t really think it s a stone wall. we have a constitutional system. congress has oversight of the executive. and the white house can assert executive privilege, but many of these officials, whether it s secretary perry or members of the national security apparatus can still put their hand in the air and say i m going to testify before congress if congress is issuing me a subpoena. and many people involved when you talk to administration officials current and former, they want their hands clean here. they see an unfolding situation. many of them now want to go to congress to make their own case. costa, stay there. when we come back, we will have news on that ceasefire between turkey and syria. ween turkey and syria hbrush. but my hygienist said goin
reporter about secretary perry is what was his intent when he interacted with ukrainian officials about natural gas in ukraine. we know based on our reporting that rudy giuliani had his own ideas about how different oil companies should be set up and natural gas companies should be set up in ukraine was talking to the president, was talking to ukrainian friends of his, business associates. but secretary perry as a secretary of energy overlapped at times with some of these conversations. the question congress will ask him is was his intent to meddle in ukrainian politics and business for political reasons or did he have the intent to do so simply as energy secretary? in the previous block i talked about how a bunch of people who thought that the administration might be able to put behind the stone wall or people who were seen as loyalists to trump have in a rapid fire of succession over the course of the last week got on the other side of the stone wall and have turned out to be antag
basically just lays out a quid pro quo even as blatantly as the one that s in the transcript from the phone call. do you think they re just betting on the no etition that americans will never understand what the latin means? is anything other than a textbook quid pro quo. it absolutely. i think mick mulvaney was trying to do two things. he was trying to get out ahead of some facts before the facts got him. he was right in the center of that. he was the one that the president directed to withhold that aid and he s the one that carried out that order. so i suspect what he was doing was trying to put that out and then define it in the best terms possible. and that s what they re trying to do with all of us. they have had to move the goal post as the facts have moved. and the difference with this scandal and some of the others at the white house is there are witnesses who are coming forward and laying out the facts to congress. so the white house isn t in the position where they can just
lost a giant in the house of representatives. the chairman was in the midst of the impeachment inquiry from which i have just come. and it s interesting to know that today i just received a copy of the summary that he and other the two other chairmen wrote of their critique of trump s response to that inquiry. now, we have perhaps even more impeachable offenses. we needed elijah as much as we have ever needed him. and while we would have felt this loss no matter when, we were dependent upon his leadership and none of us can fill the vacuum that s been left here in the house of representatives. congress woman, i ll say i knew him pretty well and one of the things i can say for him was that he is irrepressible.
that is the question of our time. one of dire importance from congressman elijah cummings, who pa passed a way this morning at the tender age of 68. elijah served maryland s 7th congressional district. he was a much beloved statesman. he also served at the chairman of the house over sight committee. we re going to talk about his legacy with congress woman district of columbia eleanor. congress woman, great to see you here. i know you knew him well, knew him long and well. talk a little about what he was like as a colleague and what kind of impression he left, what kind of the kind of mark that he left in his years in that body where you now serve. well, condolences to his wife and his family. but i should say that our loss is deep because at the height of his power and when he was perhaps most needed, we have