no wid proquo here. but the fact that they say that there s no quid pro quo does not change the fact that if you look at the basic text of what s in these messages, they are saying to the ukrainians, if you want your leader to be able to come and have this vaunted visit to the white house, you have to launch this investigation and commit to it publicly. so, jon meacham, what do you see in all of this? you can put this together with all of the stories that we saw yesterday, starting with the president of the united states on a television camera speak together world saying i think ukraine should investigate the bidens and, oh, by the way, china ought to look into them too. we learned later from cnn that the president of the united states in a june 18th phone call proposed just that to president xi on the call, said you ought to look into the bidens. the reporting is that the chinese were very confused by that request. the president s essentially outsourcing the integrity of american
authorize impeachment proceedings even though nancy pelosi s made it clear that she doesn t think that s legally necessary. so we re going to see a fight over document production and we re going to see a lot more testimony including from ambassadoria v ambassador that was recalled from ukraine in the wake of many other potential witnesses. we ll get to that story in a minute, about the ambassador being recalled because she wasn t supportive of president trump s agenda, his political agenda. josh letterman, thank you so much. steve? i just want to say one more thing. if you put the last two days in context we ve gone from parsing words in a transcript of a phone call to the ukrainian president to an inundation of new text, emails, phone calls with china, this thing is getting bigger and bigger and we ll see where that goes. we ve got a lot more to talk about this morning. we ve just scratched the surface. we ll talk to michael schmidt about the effort of two of president trump s t
expectation and it really speaks to what steve was saying at the end there about his mindset is thissa is a transaction and any transaction i m going to put on the table whatever i can to get the deal i want. and i m going to bring to that table any pressure that i can to get the deal that i to get the con confirmed again in that clip where he goes, look, i got a lot of power here. i can put pressure on china. and then to tweet out i have an absolute right, which president in the history of this country has declared to have an absolute right to do anything? to think about yourself and your presidency in those terms is why we re in the mess we re in. when you see the world through that lens, you re going to say to the president of ukraine, hey, i need you do me a favor, though, you get it? you know, this is how this works. let s be clear. i think we can t gloss over this. because as you opened the show, this is going to be the big
24 hours. there has been a lot. as we just heard, the president flatly admitted on the south lawn that he wants ukraine and now china added in to look into the bidens. he just said it. msnbc reports that president trump suggested in a call with chinese president xi in june that beijing should investigate biden. he reportedly mentioned elizabeth warren too. white house record of that conversation went into the secret vault where that ukraine call lives, according to that report. a pair of trump s envoys drafted a statement for ukraine s president to commit to investigating biden, that s according to the new york times, they just put it in writing in a statement. former ambassador kurt volker testified yesterday before multiple house committees and reportedly revealed that he told giuliani the biden story was a dud and rudy was getting bad information. and the wall street journal reports that the u.s. ambassador from ukraine was pulled from the country because she would not push the tr
and he has no concept how diplomacy and international relations are managed. michael steele the former chairman of the rnc joins us as well. i want to play that full clip for you of the president yesterday on the south lawn. mr. president, what exactly did you hope zelensky would do about the bidens after your phone call exactly? well, i would think that if they were honest about it they d start a major investigation into the bidens. it s a very simple answer. they should investigate the bidens. likewise, china should start an investigation into the bidens. because what happened in china is just about as bad as what happened with with ukraine. that came just moments after president trump addressed the ongoing trade war with china. china s coming in next week, we re going to have a meeting with them. i have a lot of options on china. but if they don t do what we