that s an argument that very few people around the president in terms of lawmakers are willing to make. they re not even touches the substance of what president trump did on that call or said on that call. they re pivoting to this idea that there is some kind of vast conspiracy theory centered on ukraine where all the answers about what happened in the 2016 election are. the white house is just trying to ignore the facts here by focusing on the whistle-blower, suggesting that these claims are not valid because somehow these individuals don t have direct enough knowledge. we ll find out if that s the case. if this second person really does have more direct knowledge, i really do think it makes it much harder for that argument to be made. and critically, they can fill in some of the blanks about what are some of these other conversations that were happening in the administration that were eluded to in the text message exchanges that were
appears frequently in documents that rudy giuliani gave to the state department as part of his bid to push them to investigate the bidens and those documents were given last week by the inspector general by the state department to congress. lots of questions from congress about what he knew and what the timeline was behind the scenes for the president s push to get ukraine to investigate his political rivarivals. thank you so much. joining me now is msnbc national security analyst nicholas rasmussen. good morning. from a national security standpoint what are your expectations from the depositions and the testimony coming this week? what is the critical moment for you? what the appearances on the hill that josh just stepped you through will do this week is provide corroborating information. other people who were involved in these text message exchanges, these conversations, these communications will all have a chance to provide their perspective, not just on what they wrote an
the house and the full senate, bipartisan, both all members of both parties voted that the whistle-blower complaint, for example, from the intelligence community had to be provided. so i think there s steps they can take. that resolution was very important in forcing the executive branch to provide information. or there s litigation, which takes a lot longer. so it s better if they can resolve it without having to litigate. shimon, i want to pick up on something you tweeted about today. let s put up one of those text message exchanges. this is between ambassadors taylor and scholand. i guess taylor s response to all this, the fact he s saying, you know, that he s concerned that this has to do with the campaign i think caught him be surprise. it would almost seem that taylor was setting this up. he starts i have a by saying, as
was military aid that was being held up. a meeting that was being held up. with the president of the ukraine. unless he agreed to investigate joe biden at the request of donald trump. and you see diplomats going back and forth in the text messages talking about that. also add that on the white house lawn the president asked china to investigate joe biden. so every day it seems like there are two or three major things that develop in the story. and the president is really digging himself into a deeper hole at this point. you talked about one of the text message exchanges between bill taylor, the senior diplomat in ukraine and gordon sunland ambassador to the eu. bill says i think it is crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign. and sunland responded i believe
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