day where, yes, this came up. the issue that got to me was this idea that the president, the most powerful man in the world, reached out to a foreign leader and asked him to dig up dirt on an american. not true. not true. there are some moments in life that are beyond politics, and i felt that this movement was that. [ applause ] this will be interesting to watch and most of the stories about this happening across the country so far. it s limited, it s not off the charts. but you heard boo, boo, fake news. actually, he was telling the truth. read the president s own words. the president reached out to a foreign leader and asked for help. that s a fact. but you see the power of the trump-aganda machine, as i call it. there are a lot of people who have not followed the ins and outs of the story or have
happened with ukraine. senator mitt romney interrupted the near silence, brazen and unprecedented, he called it. wrong and appalling. main republican senator telling the bangor daily news asking him to investigate was, quote, a big mistake and, quote, completely inappropriate. many other republicans voiced their displeasure and the president tried to clean it up. i don t care about biden s campaign, but i do care about corruption. that s campaign, that s up to im. i don t care about politics. if you look and read our constitution and many other things, i have an obligation to look at corruption. i have an obligation and a duty. democrats are building a case that the president s obsession with biden has already crossed the line.
think he feels the walls closing in a bit. this is also, i think, his typical sort of performance, for lack of a better term, of wanting to stoke his fight. he uses the terms treason and trart and people are going to be arrested and he knows that will get a big reaction. but he is in a situation here and i think this is key to understand, that he knows he s not just dealing with people inside his administration that he might be able to control but whistle-blowers by definition are people who have gone off the reservation and are saying i have witnessed something that has gone wrong here and that s an abuse and that people need to know about. he s dealing with house democrats who also have no interest in what the president wants or how the white house wants to handle this. they re going to do their own thing. they re moving very quickly. and so i think that s why you see this sort of amplification coming from him. but we are also seeing his defense kind of evolve in real time here. firs
september, urged him to fight corruption. democrats want to know did you, too, bring up joe biden. the vice president, his public remarks echoing the boss. one of the main reasons we were elect to washington, d.c. was to drain the swamp and i think the american people have a right to know if the vice president of the united states or his family profited from his position, clearly in this case there are legitimate questions that ought to be asked. it s the official position of both the president and the vice president of the united states that it s okay to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent. what else, when it comes to the questions of facing the vice president? his office issued a statement that said we ll look at this but it seemed to be to the democrats go away. right, there s no really good answer for the vice president. clearly given what we know from the whistle-blower complaint, the vice president pence was involved in some way in
report. so they believe they have enough to build a strong case for impeachment, but they re trying to fill in some of the gaps and conversations and things that were not in the text messages where bill taylor said as i said on the phone, the committee may want to know what that conversation was about. what caused him to say we shouldn t have a quid pro quo for the president s campaign. those are the gaps they re going to try to fill in. even if the president and the administration try to withhold documents and witnesses, they re going to push forward. they want to have this be very narrow and tight and focused and finished relatively quickly by making sure if the administration decides not to hand over documents that they can add that to the evidence of obstruction and close shop pretty soon. there s been a lot of reporting this week, quoting friends of the president, aides of the president saying he doesn t quite understand the depth and the gravity of this. but he does seem to und