more evidence. and tonight there s some really interesting movement on that, too. i m not sure this has received a lot of attention tonight but i find this absolutely fascinating. when the impeachment report was released by the intelligence committee earlier this week, all 300 pages of it, section one was titled the president s misconduct. section 2 was titled the president s obstruction of the impeachment inquiry. the whole thing is about the president s behavior. the day the report came out you might remember us running down how the sort of subheadings of the report, they alone give you a really concise, tidy kind of dramatic 78-word plot run-down of what the president s going to be impeached for. the president s request for a political favor. the president removed anti-corruption champion ambassador marie yovanovitch. the president s hand picked agents began the scheme. the president froze vital military assistance. the president conditioned a white house meeting on investigations.
report on the president specifically, the president s behavior, the president directing this scheme, the president perceiving benefit in this scheme. and because of that there s one specific part of the impeachment report that stands out from all the rest of it, that i ve been thinking about all week since the report came out, trying to figure out how important this is going to be in the end and how important this is going to be for what comes next. and it s a sentence that doesn t start with the behavior of the president. it s from page 9 of the report, right up front at the beginning. quote, our investigation determined that this telephone call between president trump and the leader of ukraine was neither the start nor the end of president trump s efforts to bend u.s. foreign policy for his personal gain. rather it was a dramatic crescendo within a months long campaign driven by president trump in which senior u.s. officials including the vice president, the secretary of state, the
personal gain. rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a months-long campaign driven by president trump in which senior u.s. officials, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the acting chief of staff, the secretary of energy, and others were either knowledgeable of or active participants in an effort to extract from a foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the president. and the thing about all of this is the facts are not really in dispute. the facts that came out of the investigation and more than 130 hours of public and private testimony by 17 witnesses the facts are not in dispute. but the spin, well, that s a
trump in which senior u.s. officials, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the acting chief of staff, the secretary of energy, and others were either knowledgeable of or active participants in an effort to extract from a foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the president. and the thing about all of this is the facts are not really in dispute. the facts that came out of the investigation and more than 130 hours of public and private testimony by 17 witnesses the facts are not in dispute. but the spin, well, that s a different story. the spin, whew, make you dizzy.
trump in which senior u.s. officials, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the acting chief of staff, the secretary of energy and others were either knowledgeable or active part ace participants in an effort to extract from the foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the president. that is from adam schiff s report. here is mercedes schlapp. was in the white house communications group and now is a trump campaign senior advisor. mercedes, great to see you tonight. thank you for being here. thank you for having me. martha: most of it is a rehash of what we saw during the hearings and in adam schiff s closing statement. he clearly wants to encompass everybody in the president s inner circle and put them under serious scrutiny here. sure. because the third in line is nancy pelosi they are thinking let s see if we could take down donald trump and mike pence and who would become president, martha? nancy pelosi. it s just the democrats, i