seen not known for telling the truth. but there, as you said in, full view talking about threatening china saying if they don t do what we want, we have tremendous power. and in the next breath saying they should investigate the bidens. yeah. it s a connection there. and i think this is certainly a new episode that s going to come under scrutiny from the house democrats as they continue the impeachment inquiry. and the difference it was just all said out loud and on camera for the world to see this morning. you don t need a whistle-blower in this case. you don t need a complaint. you don t need people to come in and be deposed. you just need to watch that 30-second clip of film. ambassador mcfaul, i spoke to a u.s. government official today in the immediate aftermath of this. and he said basically what phil rucker just said that the president just did on live tv everything that was alleged in the whistle-blower complaint. do you think democrats would be wise to sort of move away fr
let me just for the record i don t think there s any evidence that this was leaked to the washington post. this was dug up, investigated and put in the paper. but i hear your point that when pressed this was the story that that was a leak. well, phil rucker, do you want to get the last word here? this was strong investigative reporting by my colleagues and just one piece of context as we think about vice president pence and this conversation. he spends a lot of the day around president trump. he is in the oval office for tons of meetings. he is around the president more often than a vice president normally is. and so he hears a lot. and they have a lot of casual conversations together. they sure do. i hear you. phil rucker, thank you and congrats on this reporting and all the reporting on this story. ambassador mcfaul, thank you so much for providing such great context for this conversation. we are back in a few minutes with a look inside rudy s disinformation dossier, th
request for election interference from a foreign government even though that s the subject of this impeachment inquiry. and it s what democrats are saying is not only improper, but a brazen violation of his constitutional obligations and oath of office. ambassador mcfaul, just to pick up on phil rucker s point, here are all the times he s colluded out loud. i think ashley parker writes it as saying the quiet part out loud. let s watch. we ll tell you this. russia, if you re listening, i hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. your campaign this time around, foreigners, if russia, if china, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the fbi? i think you might want to listen. i don t think there s nothing wrong with listening. china should start an investigation into the bidens. because what happened to china is just about as bad as what
mean investigate biden. vens conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to ukraine was not going to be released. ukraine s president had already spoken to trump and was familiar with the president s demands. pence did not mention biden or the dormant probe. but former officials said that pence s emphasis on corruption probably would ve been interpreted by zelensky as code for that issue. whether the vp intended it or not. ambassador mcfaul and phil rucker back along with the table. it s more fantastic reporting from you and your colleagues. the point seems to be that pence didn t know about the words investigate biden and his son, but he was very much in on and a collaborator in holding up military aid until the ukrainians did something, got tough on corruption.
happened with ukraine. phil rucker, we lost ambassador mcfaul, but i think those were some of the examples that your paper cited in this idea that perhaps some of the strategy here is to numb the base, to numb the trump voter to all this conduct so that if and when he s impeached, part of the defense is, well, i told everybody i was colluding. it really is sort of the shifting defense of i never did anything with russia to, you know, damn right i asked russia for their help. i think that s right. there is one other thing to point out by the way in the context of the china comments this morning. he made that appeal to china to investigate the bidens almost immediately after discussing the trade negotiations. remember, the u.s. is locked in a pretty acrimonious trade war with china, and trump gave something of a threat to the chinese in those comments this morning. he said i have a lot of options with china and sort of intimidated or intimated that