beginning or in the abstract of what that penalty might be. we ve assessed penalties from a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars. if donald trump took a million dollars from a foreign government, you d say, okay, that s a black and white thing of value. if you give donald trump the choice, would you rather have a million dollars from ukraine or dirt that s going to bring down your number one opponent, he would certainly choose the latter which shows it has more value than money. he so i don t think anyone company question there s value attached to it. fec chairwoman ellen weintraub, thank you as you always for your perspective on this. good to see you. thank you. david french, before we let you go there in nashville, you re one of the clearest, smartest thinkers out there, just want to get your thoughts as we head into a weekend on a wild week about how people should be thinking about all we ve had to digest over the last four or five days. you know, one of the key ques
the obsession of the government which is to say he s deploying the statement department, the secretary of state, the attorney general is flying to italy to take meetings to look into this, he s got rudy giuliani doing an end around. you see these text messages released last night by the house, all these ambassadors, people not directly involved with the business of ukraine getting involved and protecting him and making sure that the president s agenda is pushed. the government is consumed by an obsession of the president of the united states. the government is another name, it s called the trump organization and he s running it exactly as he ran the trump organization, like you run a crime syndicate. he s right in the middle of it and then the supporting players but they re owl interchangeable. secretary rhona do this and don junior do this. he just has to distinguish between rudy giuliani and william barr, they re just all hinchmen working for him. two things i want to go back to wh
this is? we re so deep in the weeds sometimes it s worth pulling back that you have diplomats and political appointees preparing statements for the president of a foreign country so that, you know, he might come out and investigate political opponents that you have the secretary of state and the attorney general and rudy giuliani flying all over the world chasing down in some cases the crowd strike conspiracy they ory that presidt trump had fed them. just how strange and unprecedented this is. let me add a twist to that. one of the ironies here is it s some of trump s biggest fans that have put in motion the events that may well result in him being impeached. because what s happened is many of those biggest fans have been feeding this counternarrative about 2016 to him. and you see this back and forth in some of the reporting from over the weekend where you have this former homeland security
it s rather appalling frankly that it turns out it s the ukrainians that behaved for ethically in all of this than the americans. for people who read the summary we ll call. july 25th call and somehow weren t convinced that the president was engaged in implicit quid pro quo or for people who doubt the whistleblower and how that report came to be, i encourage them to read these text messages. because the people representing the united states and ukraine knew very clearly what their job was, the direction from the white house. exactly. you have rudy giuliani through the, you have the u.s. ambassador to the european union basically the two of them out there trying to ginn up this investigation. that was the central focus of the u.s. policy toward ukraine, getting this information on that would vindicate trump s conspiracy theory and dirty up joe biden. i just a question for dan. have you seen any prior evidence
ukraine to investigate joe biden. giuliani confirmed that reporting in an interview with the paper. sources and officials also telling the journal the state department was told in the spring that removing ambassadorambassador yovanovitch was a priority for the president and that secretary of state mike pompeo supported that move. yesterday president trump does did not deny those reports. why did you recall the u.s. fwe ambassador to ukraine? i heard very bad things about her. and i don t know if i recalled her or somebody recalled her but i heard very willie, to mike s earlier point about the flood of stuff. yeah. as i m listening to you read after you start to gaze a little. that s the problem. the story is so the more we dig into it, as posed to keeping it that single sentence, that s when you start to lose it. we re sitting around the table