is what the democrats have been trying to do since day one. but here is the thing, glenn, we could be offended all day long, stonewalling work. you take you to the president s taxes. we re two plus years in and we still haven t seen them. the president has been stonewalling us on things that he didn t want to put forward since he started running in 2015 and it has been a great strategy. although there was a ruling yesterday from the manhattan court that the president may have to come up and what happened? emergency appeal. you re right, stonewalling seems to work. when i heard the reporting that sondland was told by the administration do not appear, you know what popped into my head? that somewhat famous steve carell line in one of his movies where a cop is writing him a ticket every day over and over again. the cop walks up to his window and he goes you know i have to write you another ticket and steve carell says put it on my
going on, people who aren t officially in the process who ar advising the president and doing these things. is that typical, do you recall that in your experience? no, not at all. and what it does, it creates plausible deniability potentially for the president to say that these people that he is engaging with were operating off the books or that the policymakers who are engaged like kurt volker was and other, they are carrying one message, but he really behind the scenes is doing something else and they can say that they didn t have the authority. there is a lot of manipulation here the president is engaged in and that is not something that the state department responds to well. but i also want to mention one thing in the texts that i think is important to point out. at the end of that last text that you read, the letter s. s stands for secretary of state. secretary of state mike pompeo is in the loop and has been for months. this is clear in the texts. and so there is a lot more her
wouldn t the white house want him to show up and tell possibly the president s side of the story? it is a good question. i think that is not clear yet. clearly it was a last minute decision and calculation of theirs that they potentially don t want to create the precedent of complying at all with there investigation. one thing sondland could do which we re not seeing, a lot of house democrats have called on him to resign. and like kurt stroll kerr who d kurt volker did resign, so he would be free to speak to these congressional hearings.kerr who kurt volker did resign, so he would be free to speak to these congressional hearings. he has not chosen to do that sgln and wh. and this isn t the first example of shadow diplomacy. to the extend that president trump does what he does so it normalizes it, he has in fact created a world both on the defense front and on the diplomatic front where there is sort of the shadow activity
gordon sondland ambassador to the european union ukraine is not in the european union. and then ambassador to the actual u.s. ambassador to ukraine, bill taylor. and then there is kurt volker who was the special envoy to ukraine. you say why is there a special envoy and an ambassador? they have different roles. the special envoy is not an official state department position. it is not a paid position. it is sort of a part-time person who is involved in this thing. these three guys were involved in a discussion about why the aid was being held up to ukraine. and one of the reasons people were enthusiastic about hearing from sondland today when they were going back and forth in the text exchange discussing quid pro quo, he was the one who said no more discussing this on he said there is no quid pro quo, but no more discussing this on text, let s call. without a doubt the number one question would have been why did
more than any other demographic in an effort to suppress the vote.are targeted more than any other demographic in an effort to suppress the vote. don t forget donald trump thanked black voters for not turning out for hillary clinton. and there are also a series of recommendations, that is what is new here. some of these findings had already been issued by private researcher, but now we have how the senators want to address this. and one thing they are proposing is legislation for example to require the disclosure of who is paying for political ads on line, the same way we can find out who is paying for tv ads. facebook supports it, google has been ambivalent and mitch mcconnell has not let that bill move. so this is one of five reports, they have already put out one on election security, we ll get three more including one on the intelligence assessment into how the russians attacked the election which is now under some cloud because we all know that