Dispute. Now turning attention to the ron johnson letter if i may. Yes. On august 31st, Senator Johnson is getting ready to travel to ukraine on September 5th with senator with murphy. And he wanted johnson wanted the aid released so he calls the president and sought permission to be the bearer of good news. Right. The president said im not ready to lift the aid. They had this Senator Johnson, he writes a tenpage letter, very detailed, and he gives some remarkable detail and i would like to read it. Its on page 6. I this is Senator Johnson speaking, he said i asked him whether there was some kind of
arran arrangement where ukraine would take some action and the hold would be lifted. Without hesitation, Senator Johnson says, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed and he started cursing. He said, no way. President trump said no way. I would never do that. Who told you that . And Senator Johnson goes on to say that President Trumps reactionnt here was adamant, vehe
concerned about, except this, they also were concerned about a partisan impeachment. partisan impeachment because you don t like his policies, you don t like what he said and how he said it. i don t like the way joe biden said ithe but you blew that offs everybody has the backing of the international community. what we have become is a perpetual state of impeachment. and that is the problem that everyone should have. buter don t come here and be a person who is a witness, sworn witness, and not answer the questions. adam schiff is doing that fine without you. but don t come here and say i m not going to say because you know s good and well sometime a some conference at some committee roomon in some little room somebody said hey, this is interesting because i have devin nunes s phone number and that number matches. we re going to put it in the report not because we think devin nunes is a part of this but had as phone call with somebody we were investigating. that s a drive-by.
with you doing proper oversight. i ve had a lot of issues with how the oversight is done. but don t make it up and don t not tell me or the rest of this committee who ordered that. that was nothing morede than a smear campaign. to say it s not is being disingenuous with the committee. the chairman gave you a chance to rehabilitate and you made it worse. at the endu of the day by t way, also a fuller record got leaked from executive session got leaked to the washington post. and i don t understand except how we can say this is okay. how do we say this is fine? this is how we have devolved. and the members of the majority now may be members of the minority at some point. ifme we re setting the standard this is where we re going with these investigations we re in trouble. we re in deep trouble because this is d another thing that founders you and othershe today mr. berke, said earlier, the founders were concerned about a lot of things. oneab of the biggest they were