about the president s egregious conduct visa vi ukraine. what do you how do you understand the white house s actions in the last 24 hours in which it seems to be denial then a kind of almost open admission to some of the main contours of the substance of what s been reported about this to some capitulation. there are lots of people sort of looking at this or looking at mitch mcconnell refusing to object to a unanimous concept and saying is this for real or is there some strategy being played out here that i m missing? chris, i think it s a couple of things. first, i think the administration realizes this is going to come out. ultimately the public is going to know about the president s misconduct, and they want to try to get ahead of it. and they also want to try to shape it in the same way bill barr misled the country about what was involved. so you can already see the president trying to suggest to the country that, hey, if i
total of trump s behavior, not just a phone call. also yahoo news reporting the republican controlled senate intelligence committee is launching its own crucially bipartisan inquiry requesting an interview with the whistle-blower as well. quote, no later than friday, september 27th, as of this friday. and then in an unexpected development and sort of a head scratching one we re still trying to parse senate majority leader mitch mcconnell, a man who s backed president trump at nearly every turn, allowed the republican controlled senate to unanimously pass a resolution calling on the trump administration to release the whistle-blower complaint to congress. while the resolution is not binding the fact mcconnell actually allowed it to pass raises all sorts of questions about what his strategy is here. it s probably in light of all of this, all these developments. the president decided to try to make an omelet out of some broken eggs.
inquiry? was she just going to say she personally supported impeachment? was she going to setup a special committee to handle this? was this basically going to continue on the course it had? there s a lot of things happening behind the scenes in terms of people in the house trying to shape what this ultimately would become, and that was playing out not only today, yesterday and over the weekend. so what is your understanding of what the kind of buy in from the caucus is and their understanding of what the meaning of today is? well, the buy-in is certainly greater now than it was a week ago. there has been a very discernible shift in sentiment. that said it s not unanimous. not every democrat right now is ready to take a vote to impeach the president. i spoke to several, you know, quote-unquote front liners, these members from the more disputed districts who are facing tough re-elections next year. some of them came out and said
investigation to get to the bottom of corruption in their country and to look at biden s son. that call is followed by a meeting that the president has or the conversation he has with state department, his ambassador then meet with zelinsky and talks with him the next day, ambassador to ukraine. and then the ambassador to ukraine from the united states helps arrange a meeting for giuliani to meet with a zelinsky aid in madrid, spain. where giuliani has told us he was pressing and saying, look, you really need to investigate this stuff, it s important to the united states. how odd, though, for the president s perm attorney to be conducting this kind of diplomacy that is half diplomacy and half, you know, what can you do for us about dirt on biden. that is a very strange arrangement. i want to read so i ve been talking to friends of mine who read russian, and some of whom
impeachment as you know up until now in part because my constituents thought if we were really relitigating the past maybe the 2020 election was the right place to make those decisions. now we re talk about a president who is actively trying to potentially steal the upcoming election. and that if he were to continue to believe he had impunity for using his office as a means to try to interfere and impact and manipulate the 2020 election, then there s no end to the ways in which he would try to aggressively manipulate others to get involved in this upcoming election. and so to me because we are now trying to protect an upcoming election it was really important for us to draw a line in the sand to tell him if you re thinking of doing this through other means we re watching and we re willing to take action. so you see this as some kind of detrpt, some restraint on the president s behavior? yes, i think this is prophylactic in some ways.