slon sondland, the eu ambassador, whether he s going to tell a story today that is different than this is just a matter of policy and preferences. there he was when he just entered moments ago. we believe that the testimony is going to begin at the top of the hour so stay with cnn. this is a day to remember. (vo) the moth without hope, struggles in the spider s web.
to get to one place. and that is to have ukrainians investigate joe biden. the other interesting point we ve heard day after day, chris, is that this was a policy disagreement. that the bureaucrats are trying to undermine the president because they didn t like his policy. and we know from covering washington all these buildings around us, all these different agencies, state, pentagon, they can be at cross purposes sometimes if they disagree with policy. that s a real thing. the difference here is not what they would have you believe is the loyalty test. the difference is saying, no, the president was pursuing a policy that was about investigating another american, a political opponent. that goes beyond policy differences. it s not a policy. right. it is not an official policy. there were huge policy differences within the government, in the iraq war. you know, and you saw leaking and you saw disagreements play out, not like this. this is different. this isn t the president
president cares about is this fantasy about the 2016 crowd strike and joe biden s son. there is no conceivable way that is that would be very listen. of all the corruption in ukraine if it were true, and i m not saying it is, but if it were true that the president believed that the vice president s son got a payoff to influence u.s. policy, and if it were true that ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, that would be incredibly significant. there is no basis for that. you can t assume fantasies. you can t that s what i m saying. what s in the president s head matters. but we do know, based on david homes, the political counselor, the counsel forr political affairs in ukraine who overheard a conversation directly from the president with ambassador sondland and then ambassador sondland said according to david holmes, the president doesn t care about ukraine.
through this document, his opening statement as well. he says specifically what they were demanding, everyone was demanding from the ukrainian leadership was a public statement announcing the investigations in the 2016 election, dnc server and burisma. they wanted all of that. burisma meaning the dirt on the bidens. you know who else was in the loop? the ukrainians. he says, i shared my concerns with ukraine. he also says he shared his concerns with senator ron johnson. the idea the ukrainians didn t quo, how could this have been an issue, that goes out the window. this is the eu ambassador saying there was a quid pro quo both for the meeting in the white house and in his view for the security aid and that that was at the direction of the president. at the direction of the president. and as gloria said, everybody knew about it. it wasn t a secret here. so this question that started this whole thing two months ago, was u.s. national security policy on the country which u.s. sees a
why was it so important for the u.s. to maintain its support of ukraine? this all ties back to russia. speaker speaker pelosi said it right, all roads lead to russia. russia was kicked out of the g7 and congress guaranteed that they would provide military aide. this is not just the policy of this administration. this is longstanding u.s. national security policy and so to try to use military aid, again, authorized by congress, cleared by the defense department, all of the experts agreed this was necessary, it shows that trump is using national security for his own personal agenda. why does it always go back to russia? i think critics of the president who think this is someone who either, one, has a nefarious relationship with russia maybe with financial ties or there are people who also think the president has said over and over again he likes strong men and think people around the world who are leading