ukraine pursued an investigation into the 2016 elections, the bidens and burisma, it would be interpreted as a partisan play. colonel vindman, you indicated that you did include in your talking points the idea of ukraine rooting out corruption, but that president trump did not mention corruption. so when the president says now that he held up security assistance because he was concerned about rooting out corruption in ukraine, that concern was not expressed in the two phone conversations that he had with president zelensky earlier this year, is that right? correct. did you discuss at all at any point their concerns about the hold on security assistance? to the best of my recollection in the august time frame, the ukrainian embassy started to become aware of the hold on security assistance, and
attempt to intimidate her in public tweets. this attempt to shame lieutenant colonel vindman as somehow being disloyal. all of it tells you that the republicans don t seem to have a substantive case. as we move forward and these hearings will only get more intense with sondland s testimony today, i think we should have in mind the question of how do the democrats focus the public s attention on core questions? during watergate we kept saying what did the president know and when did he know it? in this case i think we re going to need to have a similar focus about the president s actions, about rudy giuliani, what was he doing? trump keeps saying talk to rudy. talk to rudy. rudy s the driver. what is it that rudy wanted in ukraine? what was he after? i think that s going to unfold in these coming days. again, every time republicans go after somebody personally in this visceral way as they did with vindman, you know that
been talking first hour about how republicans, some republicans on these committees had to actually resorted to attacking a lieutenant colonel who earned purple heart in iraq war, a hero, and it just continued because they seem to have no defense of what the president of the united states did. can you tell me how we heard about the intel community how they reacted after the president was in helsinki and said he tru trusted an ex-kgb agent more than his intel committee. i think the military has been concerned by many aspects of president trump s behavior. to be honest, i ve rarely seen the pentagon brass as shaken as they ve been over the last week by trump s decision to pardon or
relations between the two countries the people said. pompeo expressed his approval of the plan, they said, but trump later canceled his trip to pola poland. the paper notes that the disclosures link pompeo more directly to the trump administration s pressure campaign on ukraine. yet it isn t clear how specific sondland was in his communications with pompeo about what was being asked of the ukrainians. sondland is going to be testifying less than two hours from now. i would say you could read the rest of that story by michael schmidt of the new york times. we just read it for you. go out and take a jog, right? we took out one word. peter baker, sondland obviously, again, this is widespread, and you have volker going in the first, you know, first deposition thinkings that this was going to be closely held. i mean, everything is being revealed now, and now we find
wittis said this is a day when pieces of the narrative about president trump s misconduct came into sharper focus. we re now heading towards crucial testimony from gordon sondland in which he is going to be asked about all the key conversations in which he was a participant, but i thought point by point this idea that president trump demanded something of value from the new ukrainian president, the new ukrainian reform president that everybody believed in, trump didn t care about that. he wanted the favor. he wanted the thing which was helping his political campaign. i thought that came through again and again in yesterday s testimony and is going to be the focus as we go forward. john, how remarkable that an american hero mocked by republicans. fox news last night prime time