mike pompeo or anybody else who was up the chain of command from these diplomats had any conversations about the aid? in our story tonight, we don t tie any of this to mike pompeo. it s just these two senior officials that were dedicated to dealing with ukraine that were the folks who, you know, had worked on this statement and had passed it over to an intermediary for zelensky for zelensky to look at. the interesting thing that is the ukrainians had the foresight to know this was a bad idea, and they decided not to do it because they didn t want to get more deeply involved in the united states politics. you used the word poisoning, and it literally jumps off the page. whose assessment was it that donald trump s mind had been poisoned against the ukrainians and who did the poisoning? volker and sondland, these two senior state department officials, knew what giuliani was telling trump and they knew how angry trump was getting with them. trump was convinced that ukraine was a co
the statement was an effort to pacify mr. trump and mr. giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as ukraine faced continuing conflict with russia. mr. sondland and mr. volker believed that mr. giuliani was, quote, poisoning mr. trump s mind about ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from mr. zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce mr. trump to more fully support the ukrainian government. as we said, all of this comes on a day when president trump asked yet another country, this time china, to investigate joe biden, erasing all doubt about whether he could or would or will happily collude with foreign powers in plain sight to boost his reelection prospects. with the idea that the president s mind is being poisoned against an allied country and that u.s. diplomats were scrambling to try to contain the damage is a frightening prospect on its own. joining us, mike schmidt is a
president, you can t do this, this is a cockamamie scheme, there are no facts here, mr. giuliani is not an expert on ukraine, he doesn t know who mr. shokin is, he doesn t know who mr. lutsenko is, you have to clean this up and advance the interests of the united states. that after all is the oath of office the president took. why somebody wouldn t just tell him that, seriously, we have to know why everybody is so afraid of this guy that they won t tell him you can t do that. it reminds me of the explanation that former acting director of the fbi andy mccabe gives for opening the full investigation into whether donald trump was wittingly or unwittingly advancing russia s national security interests, because once again, the kind of almost reflexive u.s. foreign policy to aid an american ally, to help them protect themselves against russia, is not on the other side of a red line, it s up for grabs, in what you describe as a scheme. and i wonder if you think that
different than saying it privately on a call with the president. if they say it publicly, it locks them in to doing that, to doing what they say they will do to investigating the people that trump wanted them to. what did these diplomats want, why did they want to lock zelensky in? well, that s the question. what it appears from our reporting is they are trying to pacify giuliani and trump. they think that giuliani has poisoned trump on ukraine and they believe this is getting in the way of the entire relationship between these two countries. and in order to fix that they need to sort of get giuliani and trump to back off. so if the ukrainians commit to this, commit to investigating it, then maybe they ll go away and these diplomats will be able to do their job. we have to evidence this was tied to the aid. this was simply trying to get trump to back off and allow the state department to do its day to day work that he was trying to get in the way of.
is there any evidence that mike pence or anybody else who was up the chain of command from these diplomats had any conversations about the aid? in our story tonight, we don t tie any of this to mike pence. it s just these two senior officials that were dedicated to dealing with ukraine that were the folks who, you know, had worked on this statement and had passed it over to an intermediate of zelenskile eens zelensky to look at. they decided not to do it because they didn t want to get more deeply involved in united states politics. you used the word poisoning, and it literally jumps off the page. whose assessment was it that donald trump s mind had been poisoned against the ukrainians and who did the poisoning? volker and sondland, these two senior state department officials, knew what giuliani was telling trump and they knew how angry trump was getting with