of all and i ll start with kaitlan with you. listen to this. this is sondland making this very significant statement earlier today. i know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question. was there a quid pro quo? as i testified previously, with regard to the requested white house call and the white house meeting, the answer is yes. he makes it clear, absolutely, totally discarding what the president and his allies are saying for weeks. and what the white house are relying on and what the president was reading from earlier was the conversation where he had and called the president to ask if there was a quid pro quo and he said the president got angry and said there was not one and that he didn t want anything from ukraine. but what they are they are ignoring is what he started his testimony with today that yes,
in relation to the aid to the white house to the white house call and the white house meeting, there was a quid pro quo. and we should note there has still been no white house meeting for the ukrainian leader. so it is interesting how the white house and the republican allies are picking certain parts of the testimony to focus on but ignoring everything else he said which is there was no secret there was a pressure campaign and the secretary of state was involved and the vice president, he discussed it with, the chief of staff, the energy secretary, just encompassing everyone who surrounds the president. and so that is the question here. as the democrats are saying or republicans are saying he didn t explicitly say it. based on his other testimony it didn t seem like he needed to. it is interesting, kylie, because ambassador sondland, you can t say he s a never-trumper or deep straight. he s a political appointee someone named by the president to be the ambassador to the eu, some
round two of today s hearings about to begin. two senior officials from the state department and the pentagon about to walk into that room. it is beginning to fill up a bit. members will be coming in. the chairman and the ranking member and david hale from the state department, number three official and laura cooper from the pentagon will be sworn in and making statements and answering questions as well. manu raju is up on capitol hill watching all of this unfold. manu, what are you hearing, what is the very latest? reporter: democrats are now debating exactly how to move forward. because we are reaching the end of this public hearing phase. today these last two witnesses about to testify, tomorrow two more witnesses are going to testify, fiona hill the former top russia adviser and david holmes in kiev and that individual overheard that conversation between president trump and gordon sondland in which president trump according
alexander chalupa, a former operative for the democrat national committee who worked with the officials in washington, d.c. in order to smear the trump campaign in 2016. she met directly about these matters with then ukrainian ambassador chalay who wrote an article criticizing trump during the 2016 campaign. chalupa s activity were one example of meddling in 2016 all of which were aimed at the trump campaign. once you understood that ukrainian officials were cooperating directly with president trump s political opponents to undermine his candidacy it is understandable why the president would want to learn the full truth about the operations and skeptical of ukraine. hunter biden, biden is another witness who the democrats are sparing from cross-examination.
zelensky to go to the microphone and announce an investigation that would involve the biden family. and when you think about gordon sondland s credibility there are knocks along the way and plenty of i don t remembers and i don t recalls. but he was also one of the people who went there and testified under oath. the denials were not provided by people who sat there and were sworn in. those were provided by people who refused to testify. and gordon sondland even said i don t have a perfect memory and i could have done this better if i were given the documents to refer back to. but they re not being provided to me by the white house, by the state department. so he essentially said this is the best i can provide. while the rest of the administration is stonewalling because they felt it was my duty to show up here today. and this goes to another area where someone has questionable credibility and that is something he said he never made the connection between burisma and the biden and som