Phoebe with ambassador taylor, was he assesssatisfied that thie was now behindti him . I dont really know, because when i responded, get ahold of the secretary, and he said i agree. I never knew i whether he reach out to the secretaryhe or not. That was sort of the end at one point in the text you said lets get on the phone, you said youre an individual that doesnt like to walk through these issues on texts when you can talk about it on the 1 telephone, correct . I say that to everybody when something becomes more substantive than a few lines of text, i say, lets talk. Did you say that to ambassador taylor . I dont recall. I dont recall whether we spoke after that or whether he called the secretary. Basically, mr. Castor, wanted to get the notion across that ive gone as far as i can go with this, you need to youre the ambassador, you need to pick up the ball and run with it at this point. Okay. Just getting back to the irregular channel, did anyone else express any concerns to you abou
nodded? he heard what i said. and didn t respond in any way?re wa i don t recall any substantive response. but you never specifically referenced the bidens or burisma in that meeting, did you? i don t remember ever mentioning the bidens. i may have mentioned burisma. and that meeting was with a group, you werein not alone wit vice president pence? that s right. and you know that at that bilateral meeting with president zelensky, i believein you testified earlier that vice president pence did not mention these investigations at all, right? i don t recall him mentioning the investigations. so your testimony is just simply in a pre-meeting with a group of americans before the bilateral meeting, you referenced the fact that ukraine needed to do these investigations in order to lift the aid?
information i have to be as forthcoming as possible with you and the rest of the committee. and as these recollections have been refreshed by subsequent testimony, by some texts and emails that i ve now had access to, i think i ve filled in a lot of blanks. but a lot of it is speculation, a lot of it is your guess. and we re talking about impeachment of the president of the united states.pe so the evidencee here ought toe pretty darnht good. i ve been very clear as to when i wasy presuming. i was presuming on the aid. on the other prthings, mr. cast, i did have some texts that i read from. so when it comes to those, i ll rely on those texts because i don t have any reason to believe that those texts were, you know, falsely sent or that there s some subterfuge there. they are what they are, they say what they say. thank you, sir. thank you. the time of the gentleman has expired. we ll now move to a second staff-led round of 30 minutes.
july 25th, there s talk about a drug cocktail or something. no one ever said that to me by phone, by text, by email. i don t remember anybody sounding any alarm bell because of course had someone mentioned it, i would have sat up and taken notice. everyone s hair was on fire but no one decided to talk to us. when you talk in your statement about in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, i later came to believe, it was your speculation, it was your guess, that the resumption of security aid wouldn tur occur until ther was a public statement from ukraine committing to investigations of 2016. i believe you said at this point you believed everyone, everyone knew this; is that correct? i think once that politico article broke, it started making
biden investigation and burisma/2016 election investigation, is that right? yes. youn, say, hopefully that wi break the logjam. at this point you knew that the security assistance had been on hold for five weeks, is that right? i became aware on the 18th of july. and you understood there was a lot of activity within the state department and elsewhere to try to get that hold lifted, is that right? that s right. just about everybody in the interagency, meeting the national security apparatus, wanted to lift the hold and wanted the aid to go to ukraine? correct. so what did you mean here when you said, logjam? ja well, as i said to chairma schiff, i meant inclusively anything that was holding up the meeting and the ukraine/u.s. relationship. and what was holding that up? at that point it was the