either has to call hill and vindman liars or own up with to fact he did place conditionalities on these acts. how do you come these three separate testimonies coming into play, you have sondland s testimony on wednesday and fiona hill s on thursday. i m still concerned sondland is operating. he s a walking advertisement for foreign surveillance. to date sondland has been a treasure-trove for trump. by working through ambassador sondland trump has been able to put an official hold on political investigations and now sondland is faced with a choice. he could either continue to parrot the president s talking points that nothing happened even though he s concerned about what s going on, and then he ll have to say hill, vindman, taylor holmes, all those
colleagues. hans nichols is at the white house. and jeff bennett is following the latest on capitol hill. jeff, sondland s testimony on wednesday, potentially, going to be extremely significant. not just for the president but for sondland himself. roger stone was just convicted of lying to congress. how might that factor into what sondland will say? right. well, i can tell you this. you have republican mark meadows who as you know is a close ally of president trump, meadows says that sondland is the wild card because neither democrats nor republicans know precisely what he will testify to. now, as you mentioned, sondland is a key player in all of this. he has emerged in a number of witness testimony. not just having a direct line to president trump but also being a direct conduit for this this pressure campaign. working alongside rudy giuliani to help form this shadow ukraine policy to put pressure on ukraine s leaders to open these
do i recall, he said, taking part in any effort to encourage an investigation into the bidens. on wednesday, the eu ambassador will certainly face tough questions about his previous testimony. his newly-revealed e-mails to administration officials and a phone call to president trump that he did not disclose during his deposition. so let s turn to former u.s. attorney and now msnbc contributor barbara mcquade for a closer look at the legal issues facing ambassador sondland. barbara, always good to see you. it seems like there s a lot of there are many ways that gordon sondland could be in some real trouble. the wall street journal now reporting on e-mails that show him keeping white house officials, like mick mulvaney, up to date. that seems to directly contradict what he told congress a couple weeks ago or a month ago. yes. he s in a awkward position because not only did he testify contrary to some of the things
to withhold hundreds of millions of funds in exchange for political investigations. but, again, we saw more details, more flesh put on the bone here. for instance, pence s aide for the first time explained in detail by tby the vice presiden told her that trump specifically said he didn t want pence to go any more. with morison, we see the importance of firsthand witnesses. we see the importance of john bolton. the democrats need to see people who interacted directly with trump to push this case along to make it different from what we have seen so far. that s why gordon sondland s testimony on wednesday, we see how important that is going to be. that is potentially the most important thing this week. he is someone we have seen over and over had direct conversations with the president
trump and giuliani as they smeared her to world leaders who came to her and said watch your back? what is this, godfather ? pelosi highlighted he s running scared now. andrew, there s been this debate, do the republicans attack on substance, on the procedure that s going on here? we saw procedure back and forth jumping in and trying to attack. we certainly saw them do that after bill taylor s testimony on wednesday, but that hearsay argument is going to be harder to make as people like david holmes, as we talked about, come in and testify and corroborate different aspects of it and do provide firsthand corroboration of this testimony. obviously when gordon sondland shows up on wednesday, that will be more firsthand confirmation of this phone call. that s what democrats are going