Dispute. Now turning attention to the ron johnson letter if i may. Yes. On august 31st, Senator Johnson is getting ready to travel to ukraine on September 5th with senator with murphy. And he wanted johnson wanted the aid released so he calls the president and sought permission to be the bearer of good news. Right. The president said im not ready to lift the aid. They had this Senator Johnson, he writes a tenpage letter, very detailed, and he gives some remarkable detail and i would like to read it. Its on page 6. I this is Senator Johnson speaking, he said i asked him whether there was some kind of
arran arrangement where ukraine would take some action and the hold would be lifted. Without hesitation, Senator Johnson says, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed and he started cursing. He said, no way. President trump said no way. I would never do that. Who told you that . And Senator Johnson goes on to say that President Trumps reactionnt here was adamant, vehe
for showing up, made a conscious choice to put these records into the report.re it was a drive-by. it was a gratuitous drive-by you wanted to smear the ranking member orr these others becaus they were in thosehe numbers th were connected to that. i m not saying you knew the content oryi anything else. in t fact, you just admitted a second ago it was simply they were contacting these people. the problem i have with c that , you could have just as easily put if you re wanting to do a professional non-smear report saidar congress person one or congress person two. reporter one, reporter two. if they did not contribute to your report it is nothing but a drive-by. that s the problemg i have her. i have no problem with you workingle here or the report. no problem withth the subpoena. you can pretty it up all you want that was nothing to show the american people at least for a moment schiff report became a partisan smear against other members we don t like. because other alternatives for you
bipartisan basis for ukraine to fight russia who had invaded them and while aid, this aid was withheld, people died while this aid was being withheld and some have argued since ultimately the aid was released that there was not a problem, but mr. goldman, isn t it true that the aid was released only after the president got caught and only after congress learned of the scheme to make this life or death aid conditional on this announcement of investigation of his politicalst rival? there were several things that made the president realize that this was coming to a head and could not be concealed. the whistleblower complaint was circulating aroundmp the white house, thehe congressional committees announced their own investigation, and then the perhaps the washington post op-ed on september 5th linking the twoep and then the inspecto
the second is, he just wanted the public announcement, the private confirmation was not enough and that s anma indicati that he wanted the political benefit fromhe them. yeah. looks to me that the announcement of the investigation could benefit the presidentne politically because the announcement alone could be twitterne fodder between now an thewe next election to smear a political rival. that s consistent with the findings. you know, president nixon attempted to corrupt elections and his agents broke into democratic party headquarters to get aar leg up on the election d then he tried to cover it up just as we ve seen some obstruction s here. but even more concerning in this case, president trump not only appears to have abused the power of his office to help his own re-election campaign, he used a foreign government to do his bidding and he used military aid as leverage to get the job done. now this aid was approved by congress. it was appropriated on a
to deal with agency counsel, sometimes you have to look in camera, but once you get the ball rolling, usually it leads to positive results and historically has aloud the congress to do its work. were any of those things done here? no. in fact, they decided we re not goingth to we re not goi to subpoena certaine people th are important, is that fair to say? and we re not going to go to court and enforce them so these people have these folks that are caught in an interbranch struggle, and that s an unfortunate position for any employee of the one of the concerning things, dr.ni kupperman, who has been described by dr. fiona hill and a number of witnesses as a solid citizen and good witness, he filed a lawsuit in the face of a subpoena and a judge was assigned to it, judge leon, and