quo, it came back bribery. so this case is bribery. the democrats have forbidden some of the white house republicans from proceeding, but you can t defend yourself from an accusation that keeps changing in the middle of a proceeding. if the democrats accused the president about a high crime, they ought to know what it is, and when speaker pelosi says it s about bribery, it should be overwhelming. instead it s invisible. i yield back. ms. sewell? mr. chairman, i would like to join everyone in thanking both of our witnesses for your service. lieutenant colonel vindman, as part of your policy portfolio in the white house, you maintain a relationship with ukranian officials, do you not? that is correct. you explained earlier in your testimony that your job within the white house was to
favor, but the people speaking to each other never interpreted that as a demand. is that fair? this call with the july 10 meeting with the reporting that was going on, including the president s personal attorney, made clear that this was not simply a request. that s not clear at all. you said it makes it clear. it s not clear at all. and the two individuals who were talking to each other didn t interpret it that way. i d like to go on to discuss your reaction to the phone call, and again, your previous testimony. for brevity and for clarity, i m going to refer to your previous testimony. i did not know if thflsis was a crime or anything of that nature. i thought it was wrong. i want to key in on the word wrong here because we ll come back to that. in my mind, did i consider it
forward in the intelligence community or otherwise to say, listen, we ve got a matter of extreme importance. i am privy alone to the information by virtue of my position. and i m not going to have recourse in courts and i won t have support in members of congress, and the executive branch is also going to throw me under the bus. what information do the american people hope to gain in the future? and let s remember that that might be the case for a whistle-blower during a democratic administration, to whatnots to come forward. these precedents are there for a reason. jeffrey toobin, what are we expecting democrats to do as they as individual members get their chance to ask questions of the witnesses? and what are you expecting republicans to do? the democrats, i expect, are going to talk about donald trump. the criticism which the republicans have raised in the first day of hearings, which i thought had some legitimacy, which is that it was the testimony was somewhat remove d fr
killed. he would be killed. that s what he was saying. and it was a very dramatic moment to set up the place that he s coming from. one more thing, i was surprised that republicans didn t point out, flatly, that his very clear opinion was that what he saw and heard on the call, what he saw going on with regard to ukraine was inappropriate. it is his opinion. it might be factually based, it might be based on the policy and traditionses of united states, but i was surprised the republicans didn t try to call him out. well, it s early yet. and one of the things we did hear from devin nunes, the ranking republican on the committee was not a defense of president trump or a defense of the phone call, but really just an attack on the media. i think you see in the competing strategies almost the parallel universe we re operating in here. the democrats are trying to do a building blocks to get us to ambassador sondland later in the week, who will be the key witness. they re trying to
ambassador sondland, ambassador volcker, and secretary perry were working together to advance u.s. policy interests that were in support of what had been agreed to, but i didn t really learn, like i said, until the july 10th actually, that s there may have been a slightly earlier point. i recall a meeting in which ambassador bolton facilitated a meeting between ambassador volcker and ambassador bolton in the june time frame. and there may have been some discussion about this external channel. but i frankly didn t become aware of these u.s. government officials being involved in this alternate track until july 10th. and i think we had some discussion that, you know, mr. giuliani was promoting a negative narrative about the ukraine and certain officials were trying to help the president understand that with zelensky, it was a new day and ukraine s going to be different. is that your understanding?