politics. and michael steele, former chairman of the republican national committee. he is the host of the michael steele podcast. good evening, and welcome to you all. mr. rucker, i d like to begin with you. i have to begin with your cross-town competition over at the times. they just in the last few minutes have moved this story. the headline is bolton objected to ukraine pressure campaign, calling giuliani a hand grenade. this is by our friends peter baker and nick fan dose, and it reads in part, the effort to pressure ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the white house last summer that so alarmed john bolton, then-national security adviser, that he told an aide to alert white house lawyers, house investigators were told on monday. quote, i am not part of whatever drug deal rudy and mulvaney are cooking up, mr. bolton told
fiona hill to tell white house lawyers according to the testimony. phil, you have reported on the frenzy that followed the first word of the whistle-blower. it seems to me it has nowhere to go now but to continue as this is all ukraine all the time. yeah. i think that s right, brian. this is incredible reporting tonight by the new york times, and congratulations to them because it takes you right to the belly of the beast. we re not talking about intelligence officials or national security councilmembers whose names we do not know. we re talking about giuliani, bolton, mulvaney. these are the key figures in president trump s orbit. there have been a lot of questions of late about john bolton, the national security adviser who departed only a month or so ago very abruptly and on bad terms with president trump. there have been questions about what he might know, what he might have witnessed, what he might have been aware of regarding the conduct and the relationship with ukraine, bot
been doing much tv or anything because i ve been trying to study the history of the three presidential impeachment proceedings and then compare it to all the evidence in ukraine that s come out over the last few weeks. and my ultimate conclusion and this will be part of a longer writing project is that i think that the president is going to be impeached. i don t think that he has any valid arguments to the contrary, and it s very, very serious. and it started with, of course, the transcript, which the president himself has released on july 25th. so when he goes and attacks the whistle-blower, i think schiff is absolutely right. the whistle-blower is not necessary at all. he started the chain of events, or she started the chain of events. but now we have the transcript itself, and then every day brings new evidence that s all damaging to the president, whether it s one of his former ambassadors saying something untoward happened. today john bolton, just a few hours ago, saying giuli
pompeo, and if the way you lay it out it anything approaching end game here, this means the entire management structure of this administration has dirt on its hands here. this is the problem. we ve known for months that mick mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, froze the aid and was building his own i mean we didn t know that. we ve known that for a few weeks. for months we ve known he had marginalized john bolton, so had secretary pompeo, and mulvaney had built his own version of the nsc, and they were, like i said, stuffing bolton somewhere in the basement. mike pence, the vice president, was supposed to be at president zelensky s inaugural celebration, and in a snub, the president did not let him go. instead, rick perry was sent. mike pence has known that rudy giuliani has been running around doing this since at least january. mick mulvaney is in on it. mike pompeo obviously knows a lot, and rick perry has decided to leave the administration after being involved in some of
we ll see what this explosive testimony does, though, to their opinions about this. they ve done their level best to stay quiet, but as phil points out, the idea that obviously john bolton has known all along about the way these decisions were made, who was involved from mike pompeo to mike pence, from mick mulvaney to rick perry, people at the highest level of the government, if not conspiring, knowing exactly what was going on. and it s making republicans incredibly nervous because they have no idea from day to day what revelations will come next. wow. michael steele, what she just said. exactly. a.b. just laid it out. she laid out the indictment of the situation as it stands right now in such a way that, yeah, there are a lot of nervous republicans coming back to washington this week. lindsey graham can be on point all day long. it doesn t matter. the vice president can go to turkey. he can go to the moon at this point. it doesn t matter because the