republicans or former republicans or lifelong diplomats who have worked for i think in almost all the cases more republicans than democrats. in terms of just evaluating sort of the credibility of the evidence provided by the witnesses, it s inconceivable to me that we re not seeing more cracks in the republican political fire wall. i agree with that. i mean you have witness after witness going and corroborating what the whistle-blower said and that s why the devin nunes strategy of where is the whistle-blower and so on makes such little sense because what is there isn t any doubt that everything in the whistle-blower report basically all the key substantive points have been echoed by republican witness, by trump administration witness, by career official on and on and on and at some point i think the republicans in the house and senate are going to have to say, boy, you know, the facts are adding up here. there is no defense. i mean, the old defense was, oh this, is hearsay. there
and has been listening in. ambassador, we haven t had your take yet after all of this coverage. where this impacts your life s work. what do you make of it? well, a couple of things, obviously this is a bombshell. everybody threw sondland under the bus and he dragged everybody with him today because he has nothing to lose so he just is sticking to the facts and the facts are deeply damning to the president of the united states. second point, it s getting lost in the quid pro quo conversation but remember the first quid pro quo was an oval office visit and throughout hours and hours of testimony here, that is never been disputed and i think it s very important to remember that never happened either so when the republicans say, oh, what s the big deal, military assistance was turned back on, the first quid pro quo never happened and remember that and then, second, on the military assistance piece, i think it is important that ambassador
they get the call, they get the meeting, they get the money. it s not two plus two, it s 0 for 3. i ve never seen anything like this. and you told mr. caster that the president never told you that the announcement had to happen to get anything. in fact, he didn t just not tell you that, he said the opposite. the gentleman from texas just read it. you said to the president of the united states what do you want from ukraine? the president, i want nothing. i want no quid pro quo. i want zelensky to do the right thing. i want him to do what he ran on. what did he run on, ambassador sondland? transparency. and dealing with corruption, right? that s right. mr. castor raised another important point, why didn t you put that statement in your opening statement?