those are important conversations that we ll ask him as well as the other candidates as they make their way in. good job, vaughn hillyard. sorry for throwing you a curveball. we have sima and bob stull with us as well. look, the president says this conversation with the ukrainian president was beautiful and there s no there there, according to the president. so, why not release the transcript? i think that s the point that democrats are making. it s also i mean, the president often describes his communications with world leaders as beautiful, including kim jong-un from north korea, the letters. so, this is part of an ongoing way of describing his relationships, but yeah, that s exactly the point democrats are making, which is, release the transcript and then we ll knoe exactly what was said and what wasn t said. yeah. acting director of national intelligence, bob, has agreed to testify on thursday before the house panel. and of course, he s the one who refused to relay to congr
do you know the identity of the i don t know the identity of a whistle-blower. i just hear it s a partisan person, meaning it comes out from another party. but i don t have any idea. more reaction from the president to the whistle-blower complaint story. joining me is sima mata with the los angeles times and bob s z kluzak from the hill. what do we know about the whistle-blower and how does the president know he or she is partisan, coming from another party? that s a good question. we don t know a lot of information about the whistle-blower, but they have filed a formal complaint but the justice department has not turned this over to congress like they re supposed to, so there are a lot of questions. we re seeing the president use the issue to further this story that he s trying to sort of get
point that it may not be somebody in the room, because if it s somebody in the room, that is somebody that is obviously probably close to trump, probably not a partisan, probably partisan to trump, but then it could be somebody who was, as he said, just arranging some type of deal. the thing here is, in order to get the smoking gun, you have to have, okay, are you going to reopen this investigation of the bidens and connecting it to the $250 million in military aid to the ukraine. there has to be that connection, not just an eye wink. i mean, that s what democrats want and they re frustrated that he can t get information. a connect, bob, in forms of a transcript from the call, right? i mean yes. that s the only thing that really can do this effectively. yes. yes, that s right. and democrats, and obviously, the administration is not giving it. now, the one thing michael atkinson this is a trump-appointed inspector general. if you look at his i was looking at his question
out there of joe biden and his son and ukraine without getting into details about what he did when talking to the president of ukraine. in terms of what he did, bob, former fbi double agent naveed jamali had a different take on this complaint, saying this whistle-blower may have just been concerned that they were being asked to break the law. here s what he said, naveed. here it is. i think this is beyond just the phone calls. i think most likely there was a follow-up action or actions that were meant to reinforce this push to get ukraine to help him. i don t think that the person saw the transcript of the phone call, was in the room with the president, rather, i think it s more likely that they were involved in actually the subsequent action. this could be something as simple as this person got this order, they were ordered to act on this specific thing, and they were concerned about breaking the law. but i think it was also much more practical, which was they probably didn t want