she laid all of this out in a great piece called here s the proof the quid proquo call never happened. it s long, but it walked you through exactly everything you need. on the 9th or the 8th, you point out in your piece, that sondland testified in his deposition that it was sometime between the sixth and the ninth. they want to emphasize later on the ninth this call that maybe exonerates the president, lay out for us, explain why you think it didn t happen? i think a call did happen. it s not that the president and sondland didn t talk. what did happen is a call where sondland calls up trump at 5:00 a.m. and says, what do you want from ukraine? or as he put it he added a four letter word to it. and then apparently the president tells him, i want nothing. no quid pro quo, i want nothing.
i want zelensky to do the right thing. in fact as you lay out, there s a phone call that definitely happened on september 7th, that multiple witnesses testified to, were deposed, discussed in their depositions. and so you are making the case here based on descriptions that actually match sort of what sondland was saying in this call. this may be the same call, why is that significant? the no quid pro quo part. and house republicans seized on that. but we have testimony from both the nsc s tim morrison and also ambassador bill taylor, we re told about this call the day it happened. you have trump talking to sondland and then sondland calls morrison. the president said, he wants no quid pro quo, but he wants president zelensky to go to the microphone and announce investigations. and we have the same thing and
impeachment inquiry. sondland was pressed about the details before he testified before house lawmakers. i still cannot find a record of that call, because the state department and the white house cannot locate it, but i m pretty sure i had the call on that day. whether it was the 9th or the eighth. you had this call, it was extremely memorable, right? it was. the call with president trump on the 9th or the 8th, you recall it vividly, right? i recall it vividly, because it was keyed by the frantic emails from ambassador taylor. so i made the call, and i asked, as i said, the open ended question, what do you want from ukraine? that s when i got the answer. . so today, no other witness testimony has corroborated sondland s description of the call. according to the washington post, the white house has not located a record of this call between trump and sondland on that day. we have susan simpson with us.
bolton tells him to go to the lawyers, right? yes. his explanation for why he goes is interesting. he was concerned that what sondland was saying, could potentially be criminal. and because the nsc does not give criminal advice to the president, they wanted to make sure this was documented, the advice was not coming from them, not from the nsc. he said he wanted to protect the president. well, protect the president in the event that sondland was lying about asking trump for this. of course, as morrison said at the hearing, if in fact morrison was telling the truth about what trump wanted, it wouldn t be good for trump, it would be incrimination. the former fbi lawyer who s been a target of the president s for two years is done being quiet. lisa page s breaking point. what was anonymously going on behind the white house, now
he once again says, i talk to the president, the president wants zelensky to go in front of the microphone and say what s happening. then he tells taylor, i talked to zelensky, and zelensky told me he ll do it, he ll go in front of a cnn interview and announce what he said he would. you re really looking at it through the eyes of a lawyer and parsing all of this information. and so what you describe in your piece is a phone call even if the president says no quid pro quo, he s describing a quid pro quo. i m not saying that, but what i m saying is you can t commit a crime and say, by the way, it s not a crime. what he described was a quid pro quo. sondland is calling it preconditions. we have morrison saying it was requirements. morrison was so alarmed by what he heard from sondland, he goes to the nse lawyers, first to bolton and then the lawyers.