giuliani doing this. there were members, mr. volker and mr. sundland were vofrinvol and so much so they were jamming ukrainians putting it on the record. no, you have to say it on the record and you can tell the ukrainians are pulling back and say well, maybe you should say on the record that we get the oval office meeting before we do that. that s a quid pro quo being negotiated. i find it deeply troubling. a, the president did it and b, he had a lot of help here. you are a formal diplomat, have you been asked to do anything like this? no, i worked five years for president obama. we did quid pro quos to defend and advance american national interests all the time. that s part of diplomacy but never was i asked to do a personal favor from president obama on anything led alone helping him on reelection of his campaign.
assistance and white house meeting are conditioned on investigations? and then taylor also saying, as i said on the phone, i think it s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign, making it very, very clear. gordon sondla know why he was in the midst of this, he was a big campaign contributor to the president, a million dollars plus, he was the ambassador to the european union. ukraine is not part of the european union. he writes back, i believe you are incorrect about the president s intentions, the president has been clear, no quid pro quos of any kind. the president is trying to evaluate whether ukraine is going to truly adopt the transparency, et cetera, et cetera. it s clear, because there was a time lag, that this was a c.y.a. text message, kristen. there was a time lag, that is
telling taylor that trump, quote, has been crystal clear, no quid pro quos of any kind and suggest they stop discussing the matter over text message. that last exchange happened september 9th, the same day the intelligence community inspector general told the house and senate intel committees that the whistleblower complaint, the military aid military aid was released two days later. let s bring in josh letterman. i read a ton of text. i know it s a lot for people to digest that the hour of the day. take us through who these players are and what you found significant about what was released last night in these committees. we ve got these in a document dump and we ve been going through them all night to analyze them. what they show is that this effort by trump to get the ukrainians to get involved in investigating the bidesens was bigger than giuliani. it involved a handful of people
president has been clear, no quid pro quos of any kind and then writes i suggest we stop the back and forth by text. josh, democrats are pointing to this as extremely significant in the interactions between ukraine, the u.s., and the government s official kpatcapac and the president s personal attorney rudy giuliani moving forward. yeah, three take-aways. first of all, this was not some type of vague insinuation about what the trump administration wanted from the ukrainians. it s pretty much laid out there in black and white, pure and simple from those text messages. and there s an if then statement that s built into those texts that you just read. if the ukrainian government agrees to commit publicly to this investigation, then the ukrainian leader could have the coveted visit to the white house. we ve known there was one senior u.s. official who was pushing back on this, saying this does not seem right to me, i m not
assistance for help with a political campaign, but this time sonlan says bill, i believe you re incorrect about president trump s intentions. he has been crystal clear, no quid pro quos of any kind. then sonlan says we should stop texting about this. we have a lot to get into. we re going to dig deeper with josh letterman. he has been looking through all of this, politico is calling these texts smoking texts. you tell us what stands out to you. two big take aways that we have been topouring through all night. this was not just related to rudy giuliani they were working to aadvance to the goal to getting the ukrainians to launch this investigation into the