specifically his concern the department s leadership was not supporting the career foreign service here. and yovanovitch. you heard something about that when he resigned. this was his concern. exactly. and also our reporting has been, molly, that his concern was namely about the silence in the top ranks at not defending marie yovanovitch when she was pulled from her post at ambassador to ukraine early. and the fact that kylie atwood is now reporting the first words out of his mouth under oath are going to be why he quit after 37 years. that s big. yeah, i mean, but these are frustrations we ve been hearing from people in the foreign service specifically. a lot of grumbling since the very beginning of the trump administration. if you remember, there was a review ordered by secretary tillerson that upset a lot of people that, you know, went against the way the department has been organized and there was
ambassador volker was not getting paid. he was brought in because of his expertise. he knew the ukraine. he was willing to play along, it would appear, with empowering rudy to do something quasi-official. in the midst of it. he witnessed donald trump ask a foreign leader to dirty up joe biden s son and joe biden a potential political rival. yeah. i think he may have been appointed by secretary tillerson. somebody will correct us i m sure in five seconds if i m wrong on that. but he was still on the job. and he was trying i mean, remember what his job actually. he s not just special envoy for ukraine. he s supposed to be ending the war working with the russians by the way. he has a counterpart. a really, really hard job that everybody when he signed up for the job said he was going to fail in. and by the way he did. there has been little progress on that. the second thing is if you work
in the government and somebody from the white house says to you can you help my friend, my lawyer mr. giuliani, you re in a pretty difficult position. you know, we ll hear exactly what he said about why he decided to do that, but know that it s very difficult working in the government to not do that. but i applaud him for if the reporting now is true that he s not going to go long with this crazy conspiratorial stuff that they ve been pushing. and i think he s very credible to undermine that for all the reasons you just said. he is not a left-wing conspiracy guy. he worked in the bush administration. he works for the mccain institute. and he was there trying to do the right thing. nick, let me read a little bit more from what we re learning. and two points of clarification for our viewers. he was appointed by secretary tillerson but kept on for secretary pompeo. and this deposition with ambassador volker is expected to
ability to compel testimony from these individuals because of the wrongdoing that they may have been a part of or witnessed. it is frankly rich for the secretary of state to be making these totally unbased claims about intimidation of state department employees given the fact that the inspector general has issued a scathing report of secretary pompeo, making clear that for years secretary pompeo, and before that secretary tillerson, have been engaged in a campaign of trying to root out and punish civil servants inside the state department that are not political supporters of president trump. of course, though, rachel, this testimony is important. eventually the courts, i think, will require these state department officials to come before the house, but it is not necessary given that we have a confession of guilt. we have the president in a transcript admitting to doing something that is likely
but numerous other incidents over the past few years with secretary pompeo and his predecessor, secretary tillerson of going after and trying to go after state department officials, career officials, civil service officers, foreign service officers for no reason other than they were believed to have worked in the department at the same time as the previous administration. and so, again, just using these career officials in some cases ruining their careers all for political retribution. all right, michael, thanks for being with me tonight. thank you, chris. tonight as the impeachment inquiry moves forward there s some curious movement on the fight to get the president s tax returns. and also the news from the southern district of new york after this. in the human brain, billions of neurons play in harmony.