it is right on point. so taylor will testify he saw a shakedown and he thought it was wrong. both of those things are key for the democrats. now, kurt volker, so special envoy to ukraine, slightly different. volker was a little bit more of a mixed bag. he talked to trump about this and trump s only instruction was talk to rudy. that becomes a common theme. and rudy really only wanted one thing. he wanted this public announcement of what? rudy says, if it doesn t say ba ruse ma and 2016, what does it say? that tells you a lot. burisma is the company of course associated with the bidens and 2016 is the other piece of the investigate they wanted into the dnc server. so volker gives us that. now, volker also gives really interesting insight into the hold on the security assistance. and volker like taylor says everyone i spoke with in the policy side of the administration, they all fougtht it was important to provide this assistance to hold struck me as unusual and no reason was ever gi
caught. that s why they do the depositions in private, assuming there won t be leaking, it s hard to coordinate testimony this was proof. no small coincidence the one closest to the president is the one that forgot to testify to the most important factor. jim, let me ask you this, taylor, everyone is talking about this will be a big deal when he testifies. why? he didn t have direct evidence or any kind of direct dealings with the president about this. he goes to the concern, he goes to how unorthodox this was. he goes to the rudy bails him out and said on the show yeah i had to ask about biden. so taylor is only as good as rudy has been. fair point? so, the way i m thinking about taylor right now, and we still have to see more of these facts and testimony from next week. he seems like the lynch pin to
that s why they do the depositions in private, assuming there won t be leaking, it s hard to coordinate testimony this was proof. no small coincidence the one closest to the president is the one that forgot to testify to the most important factor. jim, let me ask you this, taylor, everyone is talking about this will be a big deal when he testifies. why? he didn t have direct evidence or any kind of direct dealings with the president about this. he goes to the concern, he goes to how unorthodox this was. he goes to the rudy bails him out and said on the show yeah i had to ask about biden. so taylor is only as good as rudy has been. fair point? so, the way i m thinking about taylor right now, and we still have to see more of these facts and testimony from next week. he seems like the lynch pin to all this. he links everything together the two pieces and sees a lot going
testimony about a continuum. how the demand increased over time. and he said it kept getting more insidious as the timeline went on. he details that in his testimony. sondland, he s going to go down in history for these two words. call me. this gets to his credibility problem. they asked sondland, what did you mean by that? i m more of a face-to-face guy. problem is he s texting all over the place. the reason he s not texting here is he doesn t want an electronic record of this. he said i knew about burisma but i didn t know there was a biden connection. and of course he had to supplement his testimony for the wee important detail that, oh, there was a quid pro quo. so he s a credibility mess. sort of cuts both ways. so taylor and marie yovanovitch, they are going to be the public witnesses next week. what does she got? marie yovanovitch has this cloak and dagger tale about how she was pushed out as ambassador to the ukraine.
these witnesses are fact witnesses. he was a reluctant prosecutor summarizing who didn t even want to appear and talk about his report. so i think it s going to be very different, and i think they know how these witnesses will handle themselves in public. they ve had them in executive session. interestingly enough, the watergate hearings were all done first in executive session as well before the senate and then in the house impeachment inquiry, so there was a this is not an unusual procedure to have them in executive session first. it gives them a basis for questioning, too. right, so this whole behind closed door nonsense is just that nonsense. it is nonsense, yeah. so taylor has notebooks. do you think he ll bring them? i don t know if he will. he might be asked to bring them