trump. forget about president trump. is any one of my colleagues willing to say that it is ever okay for a president of the united statesde of america to invite foreign interference in our elections. not a single one of you has said thatyo so far. i ll say it. i yield to my colleague from texas. yield so we can answer the question. i will be glad to answerns t question. she has i want to break this down the gentle lady has the time. and she asked us a question. the members here know perfectly well it is out of order tot interrupt members wh have i the time. the gentle lady unless they ask nl yielded to whom asked us a question. u yielded to whom? miss escobar has the time. thank you, chairman, thank you y representative jayapal. i want to break this down in simple terms for the american
pressure. yermak said there was no pressure. are theyd lying? no. we know the whistle-blower was lying.ow we know mr. schiff was lying. mr. schiff came out the day before and said eight times the president put direct pressure on the ukrainians. oops. the transcript is released. not true. that would be the facts being con tested, absolutely. we know there was no conditionalality, everybody said there was no conditionality. ukraine was unaware of the hold. how can you leverage them? they were unaware of the hold. it was never in the investigation. but what happened? what triggered it? you have highat ranking u.s. officials going to ukraine, meeting with him, convinced the president. you have the president of ukraine signing two pieces of legislation, reinstituting the anti corruption tribunal and alsoor removing immune any from
doing. theal squabbling is not goin to really help the republicans. or frankly the democrats in this. we know how the vote is going to turn out hours from now and between now and then they will go back and forth. the fairness argument they re emphasizing the republicans, the democrats need to say over and over again, the fairness argument is so bogus, article 2 of the impeachment, tells you all you need to know, obstruction of congress, the reason the republicans don t have witnesses, the reason why the republicans don t have documents in front of this committee, is because the president has obstructed and refused to allow those witnesses to testify. chris is right about the politics here, is that grievance is the high octane fuel of trump and trumpism. is that donald trump exists as presidentsmp a political figuren the sense that he s made himself america s greatest victim. andst you see this setting up. when we look ahead as this goes into the senate, i think it s a
rudolph giuliani. he s not an ambassador. he s not the secretary of state. he s not ata member of the diplomatic core. he s president trump s political enforcer. then what happens. you want to talk about the facts. in august, giuliani travels to madrid and meets with the ukrainian government. as a followup to trump saying to ukraine, go meet with giuliani. then a statement is drafted about this phony investigation and sent to the ukrainians. but what happens? in august the whistleblower complaintus is filed. then on september 9th, the whistleblower complaint is made public to congress. two days later on september 11th, all of a sudden the aid is released. why was the aid released? because the president was caught red-handed trying to pressure a
conditionality. you can t prove it, you have no evidence and even the ukrainians, even yourth purport victims are coming out in the press saying, their theory of the case is wrong, their fundamental premise has been rejected. yield to the gentleman from ohio. yield back. yield back to the gentleman from pennsylvania. i yield to my friend from ohio. thank the gentleman from yielding. they got a brand new president, zelensky ran on anti-corruption. see if he s the real deal. that s what happened in the 55 was paused. we talked about five critical meetings that took place. the last one is the most important, a democrat senator and republican senator meet with president zelensky in kiev. they knew the aid had been pause paused. ukrainians had learned a few days before that and the issue never came up. what did come up is both of these senators came back and