Trump embarrasses himself in a last-defense effort following Sondland’s impeachment testimony. John Iadarola breaks it down on The Damage Report. Follow The Damage Report on Facebook: Help build the Home of the Progressives
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“If you feel like you’ve been living a bizarro, Groundhog Day existence for the last week, you’re not alone. Each day, another witness has testified before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the impeachment inquiry into the conduct of Donald Trump, and each day another witness, or two, has laid waste to the claim that the president did nothing wrong when it comes to Ukraine, and suggested that he did, in fact, commit an impeachable offense. Today that honor belongs to David Holmes, political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, who told lawmakers in no uncertain terms that he heard Trump loudly discussing the plot to extort Ukraine.
In his opening statement, Holmes told the committee that starting June 17, his focus, along with Ambassador Bill Taylor, was to coordinate a White House visit between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which they hoped to do by having the Ukrainians “deliver things we thought President Trump might care about, such as commercial deals benefitting the United States.” But, of course, Trump wasn’t interested in things that would benefit the country, only his own agenda. “Within a week or two,” Holmes said, “it became apparent that the energy sector reforms, commercial deals, and anti-corruption efforts on which we were making progress were not making a dent in terms of persuading the White House to schedule a meeting between the presidents.” On June 27, E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland told Taylor by phone, in a conversation that Taylor relayed to Holmes, that Zelensky needed to assure Trump he wasn’t standing in the way of the “investigations.” Holmes said he understood that said investigations referred to the Burisma-Biden probes that Rudy Giuliani had been pushing in the media since March. A day later, Taylor told Holmes that in a call with Zelensky, Sondland, then-special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, “it was made clear that some action on a Burisma-Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”"
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