especially if your client is the president who s currently being impeached. if i were the president s lawyer and i wanted to go and create an iron clad defense case for say the impeachment narrative is false, that they re getting it entirely wrong, then i would go and meet with basically the opposite of everyone rudy giuliani has met with and tweet the exact opposite that he s tweeted is the thing. so on that point, i ll come back to you in a second. but on that point i ve been reading into some of the characters he s meeting, and these are some pretty sketchy figures in ukrainian politics. absolutely. so one of the people he spoke with was victor shulkin who was the prosecutor general in ukraine. when he was in charge with supposed to be running anti-corruption efforts but was actually pretty corrupt himself. and it wasn t just former vice president biden who said that, it was the rest of the government, it is our allies who all said this guy is really bad at fighting corruption
needs to go. in joe bidens telling after he left office, he really elevated himself. and that s become the base level of this conspiracy theory that shulkin got fired. and what s key here you have a bunch of figures basically unknown to the american public but in ukraine have pretty shady reputations that giuliani seems dead set on elevating as the means of defending his client the president. absolutely. go from shulkin to his successor who giuliani met with before he got to ukraine, he s the one who spun a bunch of tales former ambassador yovanovitch formed a do not cross list, that she was bad mouthing trump and those lies got spread through, and he recanted them. he said by the way, guys, i was making that up. and giuliani went back to him to prove the president is being impeached unfairly.
committee. consider your source. getting information from victor shulkin, the former prosecutor general of ukraine really should be taken with a grain of salt. he s a strong bias against vice president as does rudy giuliani who reportedly devin nunes also got information from. and i think we could expect to see devin nunes get a subpoena as part of this impeachment inquiry. he s met with several of the characters according to this reporting that are key to the impeachment inquiry like victor shulkin and giuliani. and he s very close to the president. so there s real questions whether the president was aware of nunes extracurricular activities or in some way corrected them or condoned them. while wave been caught up in the impeachment inquiry other things are happening. the president has been talking about for example the trade deal with china. are we close to a deal? president trump says we re very close but this feels like deja vu and very expensive deja
i can tell you that i spoke with bondy, the lawyer you referred to earlier this evening. he told me two things that are new for me to have confirmed. the first thing that he said was that an aide to congressman nunes told lev parnas nunes and team were investigated the biden family and an energy company called burisma where joe biden s son hunter biden was a board member. those topics were of paramount importance to trump and giuliani. trump and giuliani pressured the ukrainian government to investigate those specific topics in hopes that an investigation would benefit trump. and the second thing he told me is that a former ukrainian prosecutor named victor shulkin, an important character, told lev parnas he had a meeting with congressman nunes in vienna. victor shulkin is a vital character in this story.
he was a prosecutor in ukraine, widely accused of corruption who biden and other western leaders basically pushed out. biden and other european leaders told the ukrainian government they wouldn t get a financial aid package unless shulkin was ousted. shulkin now has claimed that the reason he was ousted was because he was scrutinizing burisma and biden forced him out as part of a quid pro quo. the evidence belies those allegations, but that allegation is something that president trump appears to have bought hook, line and sinker. and it was part of what he was pressuring the zelensky administration to announce that they were scrutinizing back on that july 25th phone call. barbara, as you know we study these things as journalists and people like betsey report on them. but the little we know about the law leads one to think that devin nunes was front and center in all these hearings. he was in the so-called secret hearings, the behind closed door