eu so it raises the question, as andrea mitchell has been raising, why gordon sondland was involved in this conversation as the u.s. ambassador to the eu. josh, what people will be combing through these texts to look for is some type of a quid pro quo. we heard pretty specifically as this conversation went on one person saying, wait a minute, the president did say quid pro quo, let s get off text messages if to have raised the alarm to say i see what s happening on these text messages, they will probably become public some day as they have this morning. do you see something in these texts that say that show if not an explicit quid pro quo but an implicit quid pro quo about the bidens and about burisma? what s funny is when ambassador taylor brings this up essentially doing a little bit of cover your behind by trying to put in text message, you know, we ve discussed this on the phone, you know that i think this is not okay, we then see ambassador sondland pushing back and specifical
mentioned it was kind of cya text where they re coming after us, this isn t a quid pro quo. but to involve all of these senior state department officials and send them off on behalf of the president is incredible. and then with respect to china, simply engaging with what i view as our greatest strategic and economic rival in the world and dragging them into our domestic politics and asking them to interfere in one of our elections is beyond comprehensionable. you ve got diplomats quoted saying we want nothing to do with your domestic politics, you want to talk about trade and tariffs we ll do that. but the president holding the tariffs over their head saying i ve got these tariffs as leverage if you don t help me with the bidens. he lacks any concept of where the guardrails are? you think? yeah, i m kinda getting that. took me a couple years. he s living in his real estate world where you re trying to get a deal done, you pull out every tool in the arsenal that you can
equivocating. it s hard to equivocate on what the president said yesterday on the south lawn. this is something that people have been claiming he didn t say. they ve been twisting the wards despite the fact we had the summary of the phone call on july 25th and everything else. he didn t mean that, there was no quid pro quo. sometimes you just have to stop and say he just said it. he looked into the camera and said the thing that everyone s been saying he didn t say who has been defending him. we were joking about the show started that just because you don t say something in private doesn t mean it s manipulation, it s foreign interference, it s whatever. he did it all in plain sight. one of the things that i think that struck me about this latest round of texts and emails and all this stuff is until now at least it was mostly rudy giuliani out there freelancing on behalf of the president. now we have the president using the state department to go out and do his business. and we can a
all that in just the last few hours. we ll get to those developments, but there s another big one. the text messages released late last night. house democrats releasing messages that seem to show how the president s top enjoys push the president of ukraine to investigate the bidens and to vft the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. that included dangling the possibility of a white house visit. the messages appear to confirm reporting from the new york times that then special envoy to ukraine kurt volker and the u.s. ambassador to the union sondland help draft a statement for an investigation into the bidens. in a july 19th text message, volker text this to sondland had the had breakfast with rudy this morning, tearing up call with yurmak. he then adds, most important is for zelensky to say he will help
thing. that one little sentence, the president makes it clear, no quid pro quo, that s a bs line. that is a cover my behind y all let s get on the same page here, oops, we re exposed sentence. and the american people need to understand why after everything else that s at the end after this thing comes to the public light. not before, not in the early tweets. let s be clear about what we re doing here, people. they had gone down that road, willie. they had started to do the president s bidding. they were making the connections and then were putting the pressure on ukraine to get the language right if you want to come to washington for an invitation by the president, you got to do this first. and that sentence at the end, just be clear, sis a bs line to cys. folks need to understand that. that line came from gordon sondland, the u.s. ambassador to the eu talking to bill taylor. clearly he realized taylor was