that impeachment inquiry public. while we wait for that we re talking about another big day on capitol hill tomorrow, day two of the public phase. that s when former ukraine ambassador marie yovanovitch is set to testify in a televised hearing. bring in kelly, she served on the national security council under presidents bush and obama. great to have you back on the show. yesterday s hearing was sort of the table setter right for the national security, the diplomatic events surrounding what democrats have called the abuse of power by president trump. what do you expect from marie yovanovitch tomorrow? i think she will be the third very credible, you know, career civil servant witness we ve seen. she s also going to be important in laying out the predicate for giuliani s activities with respect to ukraine and trying to get an investigation started against the bidens. explain why that is, because she, again just to remind folks, rudy giuliani is the president s personal attorney and m
prevented from testifying in the first place. to say the u.s. ambassador or the deputy assistant secretary of state is somehow working on hearsay, that s how the government works on foreign policy. we have to hear from the white house about what the president s views are and execute those views abroad. i don t think the hearsay argument is very credible at all. look ahead to next week when the eu ambassador gordon sondland is to testify. you have worked in this atmosphere, would it be unusual if you called up the president, ambassador calling him from a restaurant in kiev? yeah. super weird. first of all not a secure call which is a very bad thing. the russians probably knew everything that happened on that call, something we need to keep in mind, and very unusual for an ambassador just to take a phone call from the president of the united states in a cafe. that doesn t happen. usually these are on secure lines, et cetera. they re well prepared. this doesn t happen on a day-to-day
president without a clue as to how that interfered with the long-term national security interests of the united states and it s a pretty pedestrian performance by the ambassador, but he s got to tell us what he did and why and what he knew and when. you know, my day job, i cover the white house as the chief white house correspondent for nbc news in addition to doing this show. my sources close to the white house say this probably didn t change any minds, right. they ac nonknowledged that tayl was a credible witness, but our team at first read writeses if your goal was to essentially try to remove president trump from office, there s still a high bar here. there s still a lot of work to do. do you think this is a bar you will be able to clear, congressman? you know, the heart of the question, raises what we all know is true in our country now. it s very divided. and what the president has always been very effective at is shattering norms. his defense we saw this with mick mulvaney w
get done for him. bill taylor says his staffer heard this call. president trump says he doesn t remember any such call. we were in the east room when the president said that. gordon sondland is the guy who was on the line. he is testifying publically next week. how does that go? is somebody not telling the truth here? no matter what sondland says. well, it s again, because presidential phone calls on your cell phone from kiev are extremely unusual, i find it incredible that ambassador sondland wouldn t remember that phone call. and we also have another witness, david home who i worked with in moscow a straight up diplomat, not a partisan person. he would not be making this up. i do think it will put the president in an awkward place to keep saying he doesn t remember this phone call. 30 seconds left. ask you about marie yovanovitch, the ousted ambassador to ukraine the woman pulled out on apparently she says the
sondland on the other end of that phone call. what will be your committee s first question to him? well, the bottom line is, what was he doing? what was the policy he was pursuing and he has now, with his do over, acknowledged that there was a quid pro quo there was a quid pro quo, everything depended on ukraine being willing to give the president the investigations he wanted. that was the white house meeting, they had to do the investigations. that was the military defensive aid, they had to do the white house meeting. we re going to want sondland to come clean on this. you know, this is really a tale of two ambassadors. with yovanovitch who with taylor who went to west point, joined the infantry in vietnam, dedicated public servant, pursuing the long-standing effort to have us have a strong, peaceful europe, and then you had had sondland who bought his ambassadorship and essentially was for the president in doing whatever the bidding was of the