desperately wanted? well mick mulvaney explained why that aid was held up. he said so on camera. now he said he did so, the president, because the president wanted an investigation into ukraine s role in the 2016 election. the look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation and that is absolutely appropriate. with holding the funding. yeah. what you just describing is a quid pro quo. funding will not flow unless the investigation into the democratic server happened as well. we do that all the time with foreign policy. and i have news for everybody, get over it. there is go doing be political influence in foreign policy. so, yes, there was a quid pro quo on the military aid. and the other aid, $400 million worth according to mulvaney. now two points on what mulvaney said there. one, he later tried to unsay what he said.
removed it s not john bolton himself. but she can give some context to what bolton s reactions were i assume. she was number two loyal to bolton. she is his proxy tomorrow. i think that s what we ll hear hear her talk about. and she is the one who expressed concern and quoted john bolton directly as referring to what mulvaney and sondland were cooking up as a drug deal, saying he didn t want any part of it. and i think she can talk a little bit more about why bolton was so upset with ambassador sondland and maybe even with the president himself. i mean, in also underscores why we need to hear from john boltonen in all of in because he is so central to all of this. but he clearly wanted the aid to go to ukraine immediately. and he was upset. and he called what mulvaney and sondland were doing a drug deal. he and i think she heard it.
the white house. he was sending his deputies to the white house counsel s office. he called rudy giuliani a hand grenade. he talked about what mulvaney was doing as a drug deal. it appeared that gordon sondland went out of his way to say that john bolton asked for rudy s cell phone number and then one of your colleagues said why do you underscore that? why did you make that point twice? he said you work in the white house, you can get anybody s phone number. he appeared to throw john bolton under the bus. i wonder if that changed your calculation about his importance as a witness. well, what s important to gordon sondland is not always what s important to us. what s important to us is to understand what the president did and what he was thinking and what it meant and to hold him accountable for it. and that s our primary focus. look, you know, john bolton s day is coming. so is mick mulvaney. so is secretary pompeo s. so is everybody who thinks they can run fast enough to escape
aid? and perhaps what was mick mulvaney s role? mick mulvaney, once upon a time his full-time job was director of office of management and budget. but still has ties to that and the chief of staff office has made the decision to not come and speak to congress. there are a lot of questions about what mulvaney directed to happen at the president s behest and whether or not in fact that money was held up in order to force to leverage and pressure an investigation of not just corruption, not just burisma, but the bidens in hunter and joe biden. perhaps this is a way to get to those questions. and we should remember there were two instances, right, because it s the military assistance which is the core of this invs. interrogation. we ve also learned through the process that javelins, antitank missiles were held up at the end of 2018. right, right, right. good point. let s talk about tomorrow.
his afric frenemies. let me show you the subpoena right here. mick mulvaney s name, signed by adam schiff. what mulvaney has done, he s gone to a judge in washington and joined an existing lawsuit that was filed by a former nsc official who said to the judge, hey, i ve got an order, a subpoena from the house to testify, the white house is telling me no, i cannot testify because of executive privilege. no matter what i do, i m going to be violating something, so you tell me, judge, what am i supposed to do. now, the weird thing about this is that the house last week dropped the subpoena, withdrew the subpoena, that caused that lawsuit to be filed against charles cupperman. the house said we don t need him anymore. this lawsuit is moot, let s get rid of it. but it wasn t gone away and that is the lawsuit that mulvaney has join. let me say one other thing about why i think this is a strange thing for mulvaney to join. what would happen if he decided simply to disobey the subpoena?