statement which, by the way, you said kurt and i negotiated a statement and the statement never went didn t go anywhere. ambassador volker said it wasn t a good idea and mr. yermak said it wasn t a good idea and what you wrote to the secretary here relates to a generic openness subject, right? yeah, but i think the secretary, though, was on the july 25th call which obviously i wasn t on and i didn t know about. you use this email to suggest that everyone was in the loop that like security secretary assistance was tied to some sort of act by the ukrainians. no, no, i don t think i said i don t think i said that the assistance was involved here. i think what was everyone in the loop about then? well, the secretary was in the loop that we had negotiated a statement. okay. i m fairly comfortable that the secretary knows that where
for the extortion play, attempted extortion and directed by donald trump, pence knew about it he s testified to and mike pompeo didn t just know about it, he was kept updated regularly and he goes through who all of the aides to pompeo were and what s meant in every electronic communication and i imagine we ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of electronic communication. you ve made a point a few hours ago which was this is the way trump behaves generally. he doesn t say directly go and commit this crime. he works through intermediaries and see that here. i think the republicans talking point coming out is, well, the president never directly ordered sondland to do the quid pro quo. it was done through the intermediary. that s the way, unfortunately, organized crime and other criminals behave and so i think sondland s testimony is consistent with that overall pattern we ve seen from trump and other circumstances. mica mcfaul, our former u.s. ambassador to moscow is with
anything sinister or nefarious about anything of that. not the way you present it. that is the truth as you ve presented it, correct. correct. why that s important, ambassador sondland, is because none of that is hearsay. none of that is speculation. none of that is opinion. that is direct evidence and ultimately that is what if this proceeds to the senate they re going to care about unlike this proceeding which has been based on largely speculation and presumption and opinion, this is direct testimony and direct evidence and to that point none of that included evidence about the bidens and none that have included evidence about military assistance because president trump never mentioned either of those to you, correct? that s correct. all right. so going back to the july 26th call because it s going to be a spectacle tomorrow you didn t remember it because it didn t strike you as significant at the time. is it fair to say that if the president of the united states was aski
sondland linked it up to the this is not some side deal. this is the government of the united states being in play here. everybody was in play and if we really want to know the facts, we should have all those people testify. i think this is hypocrisy and i think the american people will understand it. they keep saying well you didn t hear him say that. we heard lots of others heard him say that. it would be nice if they testified and nice if the trump administration released the documents that would allow us to see that these things were linked and then the third thing, i just have to say, this notion that burisma and biden are somehow parsed and different and i really didn t understand that, didn t anyone never have the curiosity ambassador sondland and kurt volker yesterday to think, hey, isn t it interesting, why is the president of the united states so interested in this rather obscure ukrainian company? i just do not find that credible. i know they re connected.
congress. there was a hold on it. you couldn t give them any explanation, is that right that s right. you couldn t tell them why it was being withheld. i could not. if they couldn t put two and two together you put two and two together for them because you told them in warsaw they were going to need to make that public statement likely to get that aid released. i said i presume that might have to be done in order to get the aid rye leased. because we ve had a lot of a lot of argue mentation here, well, the ukrainians didn t know the aid was withheld but the ukrainians found out and then it was made abundantly clear if they hadn t put two and two together themselves that if they wanted that aid they were going to have to make these straights, correct. correct. mr. nunes. yield to mr. radcliffe. ambassador sondland, i m going to try to quickly move to summarize all of your direct