Gordon Sondland testifies during the impeachment hearings, describing a high-stakes political "playoff" where Democrats demand proof of a quid pro quo involving withheld aid and investigations into Joe Biden and Burisma. While Sondland admits Trump told him Ukrainians were "corrupt," he denies recalling specific discussions about the Bidens on July 26th and claims he opposed suspending security aid, arguing his testimony shifts focus from military withholding to a meeting that was never actually delayed. Ultimately, the segment suggests these conflicting accounts expose deep fractures in the narrative, challenging the validity of the impeachment case by highlighting discrepancies between witness memories and documented evidence. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, Sarah in the control room, can we play the GMA Trump denying bribery audio here real quick?
I want you to listen to this because we're getting ready.
Our poll also shows that 21% of Americans have made up their minds after the first week of testimony.
That suggests that they were already locked in or that really the testimony they've heard is enough.
But that's a big percentage who still have to make up their minds.
And 70% saying the president did something wrong.
The president keeps saying the call was perfect.
He did nothing wrong.
Our poll suggests that may go down in history along with I did not have sex with that woman as a very ineffective presidential defense.
Okay, but you'll notice I tend to agree with that.
Tend to agree with that.
It'll go down like that, but that didn't take him out of office, did it?
It's going to be exactly the same way.
Yeah.
That didn't take him out of office.
Today is the day to really watch the impeachment hearings.
Today, in probably the next half hour, you're going to see testimony that will swing it one way or another.
It's not going to be a knockout punch for Donald Trump if this guy changes his testimony.
However, it won't be good.
But if he doesn't, if he sticks to his testimony, I think the Democrats are pretty done.
They got nothing of entertainment and enlightenment.
Today is the Super Bowl of impeachment hearings.
Today is the day that you have to pay attention.
The ambassador from Europe, Sondlin, is now coming into the Capitol.
He is going to be testifying in about a half hour or so.
We have his opening statement already.
If he changes his testimony, which some say he's going to, if he changes his testimony, it could mean trouble for Donald Trump.
It's not a knockout punch, but it's not good because the president took this approach of no quid pro quo, which I think is a losing argument.
But he has to change his story.
If he doesn't change his story and his former testimony, if he stays with his former testimony, I think it will be a knockout punch for the Democrats.
This is the guy.
It all boils down, really, I think, to him for the Democrats.
It's Ambassador Sondlin.
We begin in one minute.
This is the Glenbad program.
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All right.
The ambassador who is at the center of the inquiry has just taken a seat in Capitol Hill in front of the impeachment hearing and the Intel committee.
And they're about to ask him some questions.
Schiff has just sat down and he's about to open those big, huge bug eyes.
Can you imagine if he and Alexandria Casio-Cortez ever had a child?
The head would be just a giant eye.
Was it Cyclops has one eye?
Is that what I'm thinking of?
Yeah, Cyclops is a third eye, I think, right?
Oh, Cyclops is a third eye.
I'm thinking of like, isn't there, there's something on the Simpsons that's just one eye.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whatever that thing is.
Well, it means Mike.
We could just say the baby would look like Mike from Monsters Inc.
Yes, that's there you go.
Perfect.
Mike from Monsters Inc.
Exactly.
That is what I'm thinking about.
This is the this is a big day.
We've had a lot of, I don't know, a lot of things that you kind of would expect.
Sondland is the witness.
This is the playoff game.
Is it the Super Bowl?
Maybe it's the Super Bowl.
It's right there.
The Democrat is in the playoffs.
It's a lot of playoffs.
Yeah.
It's a high-stakes game.
And here's the thing.
Sondlin is the, one of the big complaints that Republicans have is you keep giving us hearsay evidence.
None of these people have even talked to the president.
Well, Sondlin has talked to the president.
All the things that have come out that have been reported as these huge bombshell negatives for the president have all been through Sondland because Sondland was the guy that talked to the president.
He's the guy who was on the phone at this restaurant and all the people around apparently overheard it.
He's the guy that reportedly after the conversation said, you know, Trump doesn't care about Ukraine.
All he cares about is his own personal benefit with politics.
Now, Sonlin has not said he said any of those things.
He has revised his testimony a couple times to move it more towards the evidence Democrats have presented.
So he came out and said he's looking for his survival, I think, one way or another.
He's a guy.
He's not a political kind of guy, and he's looking for his survival.
And if he was lying, he realized, oh, crap, I'm in deep trouble.
Yeah, and they keep bringing up this, you know, the media keeps bringing up the same point, which is every time they bring one of these people up, this is a public servant.
This man has been, worked for Republicans and Democrats.
He's been in the State Department for 912 years.
And they bring this up as positive.
Yeah, that's right.
So not that guy.
Sondlin was not a huge Trump fan initially, but came around to him in a big way and wound up donating over a million dollars to his inauguration campaign, mega donor, as is the case with every administration.
The mega donors wind up getting ambassadorships, and so he's the guy going to the EU.
I want to take Adam Schiff because he's talking about the 2016 election in Ukraine, that it was a discredited conspiracy theory that there was anything going on.
And who the president feared the most was Joe Biden, and Sonlin's about to say that that's all true.
In exchange for politically motivated investigations that Trump believed would help his re-election campaign.
The first investigation was of a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in the 2016 election.
Adam, they can both be responsible.
The second investigation that Trump demanded was into a political rival that he apparently feared most, Joe Biden.
Trump sought to weaken Biden and to refute the fact that his own election campaign in 2016 had been helped by a Russian hacking and dumping operation and Russian social media campaign directed by Vladimir Putin to help Trump.
Trump's scheme undermined military and diplomatic support.
To deal with Adam Schiff's pace, it's really deliberate, slow, and weird.
And then when he gets questions from other Republicans in the committee, he just stares straightforward like he's on some weird drug.
You notice that?
It's really creepy.
Yeah, he might be on some weird drug.
Oh, okay.
You're expecting someone to cares about explain him.
Even his mother's like, I have no idea.
He's been creepy weird ever since he was sitting at the dinner table in his high chair with those creepy eyes and that big forehead.
Found himself increasingly embroiled in an effort to press the new Ukrainian president that deviated sharply from the norm in both terms of policy and process.
Interesting visual for radio listeners.
They're showing clips of Sonlin as Schiff is reading this.
Sanlon does not look U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
He looks confident.
He looks confident.
He looks like this is a joke.
I know exactly what happened.
Yeah, he looks like he's been smiling through this with Schiff.
He's projecting confidence.
Yeah.
Not a, I'm going to tell it to a big secret, and I'm so sorry.
It's not that vibe, at least visually, from Sanlin.
I want to send someone at a very early statement.
Stations, why don't we take a quick break now?
Get ahead so we don't break up Sonlin's statement.
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All right.
10-second station ID.
And back to the hearing.
The White House meeting for President Zelensky, which the group deemed crucial for U.S.-Ukrainian relations.
So as Schiff is blabbing here, can I give you a preview here of this opening statement?
There's some pretty big stuff in it.
He goes through a series of about six points here at the beginning of it.
We've acquired the testimony here in advance.
And what's interesting here, probably the big takeaway is his fourth point here.
And he's going to go through this whole thing in just a couple of minutes, but we're going to give you a preview anyway.
He says, as I testified previously, this is when he changed his testimony.
Mr. Giuliani's requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky.
Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 DNC server and burisma.
Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.
So that is as clear an accusation as the only one that really has any real first-hand knowledge.
Credibility on this.
And he's saying, now, again, like you can say, this is why we've made this point 5,000 times.
You can't set the hurdle at quid pro quo.
It's a dumb place to defend because there's tons of people who were all acting like it was a quid pro quo.
They all seem to have evidence and at least belief and testimony here that it happened.
Now, Sondlin is as close as we've been able to see to the president that is saying, yes, that's what it was.
Again, Sondlin is not just some guy.
He's a huge supporter of the president.
So that is a big deal.
And it points to, if nothing else, Glenn, and see if you agree with this, that Giuliani is going to be the focus of this.
These people who are in this situation who are on the borderline, like Sondlin, who could get in trouble or could be the hero witness, are going to push this not necessarily to the president at the end, but towards Giuliani.
And if they can get Giuliani to take the blame for all of it, it may be a place where the president and everybody else winds up being comfortable.
Now, whether that works or not, I don't know.
It's a big question of whether the American people believe that.
And I think there's some evidence to believe that Giuliani does this type of thing on his own.
But he says in his testimony that we knew, we didn't think Giuliani was necessary for this process, but we did not think he was acting in bad faith.
We did not think he was trying to do something illicit.
We thought it was a legitimate role.
We just didn't really like that he was involved in our thing.
So he says, finally, at all times, I was acting in good faith as presidential appointee.
I followed the directions of the president.
We worked with Mr. Giuliani because the president directed us to do so.
We had no desire to set any conditions on the Ukrainians.
Indeed, my personal view, which I shared repeatedly with others, was that the White House meeting and security assistant should have proceeded without preconditions of any kind.
We were working to overcome the problems given the facts as they existed.
Our only interest was to advance long-standing U.S. policy and support Ukraine's fragile democracy.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And in the previous paragraph, also talks about the quid pro quo he's mentioning, he's saying was a thing, was about the meeting, not about the money.
Correct.
When he found out about the money, the security assistants, he was very upset about that and did not think that that should be any part of the policy whatsoever.
Giuliani and the President00:08:18
So he is making a distinction there.
It's like, yeah, we were doing a, yeah, you can come meet with the president, but you got to do this investigation thing.
That did happen, according to Sondland.
However, he's saying when he found out about the security assistance being withheld, he was very angry about it.
And he said he was adamantly opposed to suspension of any aid.
He tried diligently to ask why the aid was suspended, but never received a clear answer.
What's interesting about that is it means the quid pro quo that he's talking about, according to Sondlin, did not have to do with the money.
He never got an answer as to why the money was suspended.
That's a big, big distinction here.
The Democrats will certainly push on that to see if they can get something else to pop out of it.
But that is, that's a, it looks like that's the direction, the sort of the window he's trying to fit this into.
So he says, with enthusiasm, we returned to the White House May 23rd to brief the president from Ukraine.
The important strategic importance of Ukraine and the value of strengthening the relationship with President Zelensky to support this reformer, we asked the White House for two things, a working phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, and second, a working Oval Office visit.
In our view, both were vital to cementing the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, demonstrating support for Ukraine in the face of Russia aggression and advancing broader U.S. policy interest.
Unfortunately, Trump was skeptical.
He expressed concerns that the Ukrainian government was not serious about reform.
He even mentioned that Ukraine tried to take him down in the last election.
Our response to the persistent efforts to change his views, President Trump directed us, talk with Rudy.
We understood talk with Rudy meant Mr. Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.
Let me say again, we weren't happy with the president's directive to talk with Rudy.
We didn't want to involve Mr. Giuliani.
I believe then, as I do now, that the men and women of the State Department, not the president's personal lawyer, should take responsibility for Ukrainian matters.
So do I, but unless there's something else going on.
Is Schiff done with this yet?
He's still blabbing.
He's still blabbing.
President Zelensky did not clear things up and publicly.
The only person this impeachment is more about than actual President Trump is Schiff.
It's all about Schiff.
The Schiff show.
He loves it.
Schiff show with the goo-goo-googly eyes.
I first communicated with Mr. Giuliani in early August.
He emphasized that the president wanted a public statement from Zelensky.
Mr. Giuliani specifically mentioned the 2016 election, Burisma, and Tukop, the two things that were important to the president.
We kept the leadership of the State Department and NSE informed about our activities.
We included communication with the director of Secretary of State, Pompeo, his counselor, his executive secretary, all within the State Department, communications with Ambassador John Bolton, Fiona Hill, blah, blah, blah.
They all knew what we were doing and why.
Well, that doesn't, does that look good for them?
Because they all kind of said they didn't know what was going on.
I mean, it is, you can tell there is seemingly animosity between Sondland, again, who's not a State Department guy, although he does believe in the State Department and had a big role there, between him and Giuliani.
I mean, they are throwing a lot of this on Giuliani.
And, you know, while they're saying, like, there's a big, you know, segment kind of that you mentioned there where he is saying, look, we didn't want to do this.
We didn't want Giuliani involved.
The president, though, was skeptical of the State Department, and so we went along with it, but we did not want Giuliani involved in this.
Now, look, it's the president's decision whether Giuliani's, I mean, the president's the guy paying him, right?
It's his personal lawyer.
So he gets to make those decisions, and Sondlin respects them here, but is pointing out over and over again that he did not like the idea, the road it went down.
So it really looks in this testimony so far that you haven't heard yet, but we're reading ahead on his opening statement.
His opening statement, at least as far as we have read, I'm halfway through page the 24-page document and reading it as we are telling you about it.
He looks like he's going after Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani looks like he's going to be the fall guy.
Can we take Nunez and his opening statement?
Coming up here.
He's coming up in just a second.
Some things happened yesterday that we'll get into as well that did not go well for the Democrats.
And, you know, well, let's just see.
This is a really important article drafted against an important day for the impeachment hearing.
Adam Schiff.
And with that, I recognize Ranking Member Nunes for any remarks that he has.
Thank God finally finished.
Thank the gentleman.
As we learned last night, story time last night.
We get story time first thing this morning.
Ambassador Sonlin, welcome.
Glad you're here.
I'm really not glad you're here, but welcome to the fifth day of this circus.
So as I've noticed, he really does look happy.
The Democrats on this committee spent three years accusing President Trump of being a Russian agent.
In March 2018, after a year-long investigation, Intelligence Committee Republicans issued a 240-page report describing in detail how the Russians meddled in the 2016 elections and making specific recommendations to improve our election security.
Denouncing the report as a whitewash and accusing Republicans of subverting the investigation, the Democrats issued their own report, focusing on their now debunked conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to hack the elections.
Notably, the Democrats vowed at the time to present a further, quote, comprehensive report, unquote, after they finished their investigation into Trump's treasonous collusion with Russia.
For some completely inexplicable reason, after the implosion of their Russia hoax, the Democrats failed to issue that comprehensive report.
We're still waiting.
This episode shows how the Democrats have exploited the Intelligence Committee for political purposes for three years, culminating in these impeachment hearings and their mania to attack the president.
No conspiracy theory is too outlandish for the Democrats.
Time and time again, they floated the possibility of some far-fetched malfeasance by Trump, declared the dire need to investigate it, and then suddenly dropped the issue and moved on to their next asinine theory.
A sampling of their accusations and insinuations includes these.
Trump is a longtime Russian agent as described in the still dossier.
The Russians gave Trump advance access to emails stolen by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The Trump campaign based some of its activities on these stolen documents.
Trump received nefarious materials from the Russians through a Trump campaign aid.
Trump laundered Russian money through real estate deals.
Trump was blackmailed by Russia through his financial exposure with Deutsche Bank.
Trump had a diabolical plan to build a Trump tower in Moscow.
Trump changed the Republican National Committee platform to hurt Ukraine and benefit Russia.
The Russians laundered money through the NRA for the Trump campaign.
Trump's son-in-law lied about his Russian contacts while obtaining his security clearance.
It's a long list of charges, all false.
Sondland Opens Hearing00:14:57
And I could go on and on and on.
So this is Devin Nunez.
He's got a few more minutes left.
Let's take a quick break so we get right to the ambassador's opening statement.
He's going to open for just a few minutes about, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Thank you for having me here.
I'm a trusted human being, blah, blah, blah.
Then he gets into some real meat, and we'll see how that goes coming up.
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This is the biggest day of the impeachment hearing so far.
If they can't get anything out of Sondlin, I aren't going to get anything out of anybody.
Go to Blazetv.com.
We'll have the whole review tonight.
Use promo code Glenn. This is the Glenn Beck program.
Today is the playoff game.
Today is a day you have to pay attention to the hearing.
We're going to get right to Ambassador Sondlin.
He is key to this, the only one who has anything close to first-hand knowledge of Quid Pro Quo.
He's going to say for the first time in changing his testimony that there was Quid Pro Quo.
Few Americans have heard my name before these events.
So before I begin my substantive testimony, please let me share some of my personal background.
My parents fled Europe during the Holocaust.
Escaping the atrocities of that time, my parents left Germany for Uruguay and then in 1953 emigrated to Seattle, Washington, where I was born and raised.
Like so many immigrants, my family was eager for freedom and hungry for opportunity.
They raised my sister and me to be humble, hardworking, and patriotic.
And I am forever grateful for the sacrifices they made on our behalf.
Public service has always been important to me.
As a lifelong Republican, I have contributed to initiatives of both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In 2003, I served as a member of the transition team for Oregon Democratic Governor Ted Kulangowski.
Governor Kulangowski also appointed me to serve on various statewide boards.
In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed me as a member of the Commission on White House Fellows.
I worked with President Bush on charitable events for his Foundation's Military Service Initiative, and I also worked briefly with former Vice President Joe Biden's office in connection with the Vice President's nationwide anti-cancer initiative at a local Northwest hospital.
And of course, the highest honor in my public life came when President Trump asked me to serve as the United States Ambassador to the European Union.
The Senate confirmed me as an ambassador on a bipartisan voice vote, and I assumed the role in Brussels on July 9, 2018.
Although today is my first public testimony on the Ukraine matters, this is not my first time cooperating with this committee.
As you know, I've already provided 10 hours of deposition testimony, and I did so despite directives from the White House and the State Department that I refused to appear, as many others have done.
I agreed to testify because I respect the gravity of the moment and I believe I have an obligation to account fully for my role in these events.
But I also must acknowledge that this process has been challenging and in many respects less than fair.
I have not had access to all of my phone records, State Department emails, and many, many other State Department documents.
And I was told I could not work with my EU staff to pull together the relevant files and information.
Having access to the State Department materials would have been very helpful to me in trying to reconstruct with whom I spoke and met and when and what was said.
As ambassador, I've had hundreds of meetings and calls with individuals, but I'm not a note-taker or a memo writer, never have been.
My job requires that I speak with heads of state, senior government officials, members of the cabinet, the president, almost each and every day.
Talking with foreign leaders might be memorable to some people, but this is my job.
I do it all the time.
My lawyers and I have made multiple requests to the State Department and the White House for these materials.
Yet these materials were not provided to me, and they have also refused to share these materials with this committee.
These documents are not classified, and in fairness and in fairness, should have been made available.
In the absence of these materials, my memory, admittedly, has not been perfect.
And I have no doubt that a more fair, open, and orderly process of allowing me to read the State Department records and other materials would have made this process far more transparent.
So, good point from him.
Basically, he is explaining why his testimony has changed.
So, you can't call him a flip-flop or he perjured himself last time.
He's saying, I don't really recall things and I have no access to anything.
The records should be allowed to be looked into, again, if this were a fair process.
I think that will all change if it goes to the Senate.
Ambassador Bolberg and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the President of the United States.
We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani.
Simply put, we were playing the hand we were dealt.
We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose a very important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine.
So we followed the President's orders.
Second, although we disappeared the need to involve Mr. Giuliani, at the time we did not believe that his role was improper.
As I previously testified, if I had known of all of Mr. Giuliani's dealings or his associations with individuals, some of whom are now under criminal indictment, I personally would not have acquiesced to his participation.
Still, given what we knew at the time, what we were asked to do did not appear to be wrong.
Third, let me say, precisely because we did not think that we were engaging in improper behavior, we made every effort to ensure that the relevant decision makers at the National Security Council and the State Department knew the important details of our efforts.
The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false.
That is true.
I have now identified certain emails and messages through the State Department.
It is standard operating procedure.
Show that the leadership of the State Department, the National Security Council, and the White House were all informed about the Ukraine efforts from May 23rd, 2019, until the security aid was released on September 11, 2019.
I will quote from some of those messages with you shortly.
Fourth, as I testified previously, as I testified previously, Mr. Giuliani's requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky.
Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing the investigations of the 2016 election DNC server and Burisma.
Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the President of the United States, and we knew these investigations were important to the President.
Fifth, in July and August of 2019, we learned that the White House had also suspended security aid to Ukraine.
I was adamantly opposed to any suspension of aid.
I was adamantly opposed to any suspension of aid, as the Ukrainians needed those funds to fight against Russian aggression.
I tried diligently to ask why the aid was suspended, but I never received a clear answer.
Still haven't to this day.
In the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 elections and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded.
So what just happened is really important.
He said there is a quid pro quo, but it was for the White House visit.
That's different.
That's different than the money.
That's not bribery.
Hey, I'm not going to give you some unless you come over to my house and we talk.
That's not bribery.
And he said, I've never been given a good answer.
I later came to believe that's his own opinion.
Right.
They may try to draw a line there, and that's one that you'll probably see tossed around today to defend that.
I think he believed very seriously that it was and acted as if it was with the Ukrainians.
But he does not have direct knowledge that it was holding back the money for Investigations, which is a huge part of what this is all based on.
The president of any kind.
Let's go ahead and listen.
We were working to overcome the problems, given the facts as they existed.
Our only interest, and my only interest, was to advance long-standing U.S. policy and to support Ukraine's fragile democracy.
Now, let me provide additional details specifically about Ukraine and my involvement.
First, my very first days as ambassador to the EU, which was starting back in July of 2018, Ukraine has featured prominently in my broader portfolio.
Ukraine's political and economic development are critical to the long-standing and long-lasting.
We're going to take a quick break as he goes into a little bit of this.
I just want to recap.
If you just join us, this is really important testimony.
This is Sonlin.
This is not going well for the president, but it's not a knockout punch by any stretch.
He says that Mr. Giuliani did have quid pro quo.
They were working through Giuliani, but it was for the White House visit of President Zelensky, not for the aid.
He said later, the White House suspended the aid.
I've never been given an answer, and I came to believe that it was about that.
However, that it was released before there was any kind of announcement that was made.
So it kind of undermines that.
But you can believe whatever you want, but those are not facts now.
He said we were working to overcome two problems.
We were trying to get out of the way and trying to get the president to meet with Zelensky and to continue the long-standing State Department policies.
Those long-standing State Department policies are what we laid out in the last special.
Those are not good policies, but that's what he said he was trying to get to and to cement a U.S. relationship with Ukraine, which I think all of us would agree with.
more with Ambassador Sondland and his testimony today in just a minute.
Mike Lindell Interrupts00:05:47
So Mike Lindell is the inventor of the MyPillow.
His pillow is given me last night.
I actually said, thanks, Mike.
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This is, make no mistake, this is not good testimony for the president.
This is Ambassador Sonlin.
He is a career diplomat.
He is, you know, been in the bowels of the State Department for a long time.
He is, in his own words, protecting the long-standing U.S. policy in Ukraine.
I think that's the worst thing that could happen because that's riddled with corruption.
The president has built his entire case on there was no quid pro quo.
We have been saying forever: stop saying that because quid pro quo is a part of life.
And if it's in the national interest, of course, there's, I want to see what you're doing.
In the ambassador's own testimony today, he does say that what was sent to Zelensky before the phone call was: you have to say that you are going to have an open and transparent investigation into these things.
The president was skeptical of Ukraine, didn't believe anything in Ukraine.
Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter.
The president's mindset was that it's corrupt.
He was being informed by several people.
was corrupt.
He didn't believe the long-standing State Department people who were in bed with George Soros and everybody else.
I happen to believe that.
However, the president has made this entire thing about quid pro quo, something that they started in August, and it just doesn't hold up.
Now with this ambassador saying there was quid pro quo, it was not on the military aid.
It was on the meeting between the two, and it came from Rudy Giuliani.
That changes things for the president.
Hopefully the president will notice that this strategy isn't going to work for him because this is all you'll hear about in the press today.
But we have another way of looking at it, and that's coming up.
You're listening to Glenn Beck.
That is one of my oldest predictions coming true.
I mean exactly word for word.
That's what I said like in 2006 or 2007.
If Barack Obama is elected, this guy's so buttoned up that we're going to get a guy, Gravy Stain and Assured, he'll fart.
That's what I did.
Yep, that was me.
I fought it.
Don't we all fart?
That's exactly.
And we got him.
And we got him.
Although he has not technically done that on camera.
There's been no farts on camera.
No, but there's some stinky things that have happened.
He's got at least a year left in office.
This Sondlin testimony is going to be interesting to watch how the White House reacts to this.
I know people will tell you that this is no big deal.
This, in my opinion, is not an impeachable offense, the quid pro quo, but the president has built his case on that, that it didn't happen.
And that's the hill he wanted to die on.
And we were like, don't die on that hill.
But Sondlin has said there is quid pro quo.
The Quid Pro Quo Debate00:15:05
But there's a couple of other things that have just happened.
We'll start there in one minute.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
Today is the playoffs, if you will, of the impeachment hearing.
Ambassador Sondlin has been testifying now for about 40 minutes, and he hasn't gotten to questions and answers yet, but he has said some remarkable things not helpful to the president.
He's really the only guy with any kind of direct knowledge on these things.
He talked about Quid Pro quo and the July 25th phone call in the restaurant that everybody overheard.
He clarifies both of those things, and we go there in one minute.
This is the Glenbeck program.
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So I want to take you back to the hearings.
Sondlin, Ambassador Sonlin, is still reading his opening statement.
If you just joined us, you missed a couple of things.
Let me just read probably the most critical thing in the last 20 minutes.
Also, July 26th, shortly after our Kyiv meetings, I spoke by phone with President Trump, the White House, which had finally shared certain call dates and times with my attorneys will confirm this.
The call lasted five minutes.
I remember I was at a restaurant in Kyiv, and I had no reason to doubt that this conversation included the subject of investigations.
Again, given Mr. Giuliani's demand that President Zelensky make a public statement about investigations, I knew the topic of investigations was important to the president.
We did not discuss any classified information.
Other witnesses recently shared their recollections of overhearing this call, but for the most part, I have no reason to doubt their accounts.
It is true that the president speaks loudly at times.
It's also true that we discussed ASAP Rocky.
It's true that the president likes colorful language.
While I can't remember the precise details, again, the White House has not allowed me to see any of the readouts of that call.
The July 26th call did not strike me as significant at the time.
Actually, I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations, particularly what we were hearing from Mr. Giuliani about the president's concerns.
However, I have no recollection of discussing Vice President Biden or his son on the call or after the call ended.
I know that members of this committee have frequently framed those complicated issues in the form of a simple question.
Was there quid pro quo?
As I testified previously with regard to the White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes, there was.
Mr. Giuliani conveyed to Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volcker, and others the president wanted a public statement from President Zelensky committing to investigations of Burisma and the 2016 election.
Mr. Giuliani expressed those requests directly to the Ukrainians.
Mr. Giuliani also expressed those requests directly to us.
We all understood the prerequisites for a White House call and a White House meeting.
It reflected President Trump's desires and requirements.
So they talk about, you know, it was no secret.
In fact, let me quote, it was no secret.
Everyone was informed via email on July 19th, days before the presidential call.
As I communicated to the team, I told President Zelensky in advance that assurances to, quote, run a fully transparent investigation, end quote, and quote, turn over every stone, end quote, were necessary in his call with the president.
That doesn't seem like a bad thing to ask for if you want a meeting.
The rest of it seems to be this is what I heard or what I later came to believe, but no evidence.
But make no mistake, this is going to hurt the president's case because he has made his case, which it is not.
But he has decided to make the case all about quid pro quo.
This is the only guy with first-hand knowledge that can say there was quid pro quo.
But he didn't say it was happening from the president.
He said it was happening through Rudy Giuliani.
That only Rudy Giuliani said quid pro quo.
You have to do this or he's not going to get that meeting.
But he is saying that did come directly from the president to Giuliani.
But he does not have first-hand knowledge, but that would, you know, that would be a good assumption.
Sure.
I think it's important to kind of talk about what we're doing here today, which is, I think you can go probably all over talk radio today and get people telling you that, you know, oh, these guys are all, it's all a sham and it's a hoax and there's nothing going on here.
And you can certainly go on every media source today and they're going to say this is the worst thing in the world.
What I feel like it's important for us to do today is to look at this and see how is the media going to take this?
How are they going to push this to the American people?
What the truth is and what is still speculation.
And what is the approach the Democrats are trying to take here?
Right.
They are playing by the president.
They're letting him hang himself on the quid pro quo.
When I say this is bad for the president, I mean it's bad for the president because he has insisted on making it only about that.
It's not about that.
It's about the national interest on what happened in the 2016 election and deep corruption in our State Department and former administration.
That's what this is really all about.
But he has insisted on making this about quid pro quo.
And so because everybody knows that, what's going to happen is the media is just going to pound Sondland's thing into the ground saying, yes, those who question if there was a quid pro quo, I can tell you, yes.
This does, I think, potentially provide an off-ramp for Trump on that defense, which is to say, wait a minute, we're talking about the meeting?
Well, meetings we use for all sorts of things.
You were talking about security.
You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
I didn't withhold that.
I didn't withhold their safety for any of these things.
I withheld a meeting, as Sondlan said.
And that does give him an off-ramp from that argument, potentially.
If he decides to take it, he's had plenty of it.
He's had off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp.
The biggest one being Mick Mulvaney, who came out and took all the arrows for saying, look, it's not about quid pro quo.
It stuff happens all the time.
And we haven't, I mean, Mick's been invisible since.
Apparently did not go over well in the White House and was not received well by the media, but he was being honest, which is like this stuff happens all the time.
Of course, when you're giving a company or a country $391 million, there are some strings attached to that.
Yeah, it's true.
And there's real nuance in Ambassador Sondlin's testimony.
He talks about how the president didn't believe anybody in Ukraine.
He thought they were all corrupt.
He didn't want anything to do with it.
So there, again, is a reason in national interests to withhold the money.
And that backed up Trump's sort of telling of this, which is it was for the national interest and not for personal, private political benefits.
So we're talking about a couple of things.
We're talking about how the media is going to run with it, and you know that.
how the legal case should be run here by the Republicans, but I don't know what the Republicans are doing and what this means for the deep state.
Now, yesterday we had some pretty incredible things happen yesterday with the witnesses that were there.
Vinman is a guy who was pursued by Ambassador Sondlin and Rudy Giuliani.
He was a guy who said there was no national interest in this.
If Ukraine was engaging in U.S. election interference, colluding with Obama, and Bidens were using the power of the government to make millions of dollars with a known corrupt oligarch, he didn't hear about it and it wasn't in the national interest.
Well, that doesn't make any sense at all.
He didn't.
It showed that the three amigos were Sondlin, the guy who's testifying now, Vinman, who testified yesterday, and the whistleblower.
Vinman was on the phone call, and we found out yesterday that when he finished the phone call, he immediately ran out and talked to the whistleblower and I believe Sondlin, right?
And I think it's Sondlin.
And they started to war game this out.
Now, it wasn't Sondlin.
Who was the other guy?
It was the other guy, the bow tie guy, wasn't it?
Taylor.
Taylor was a fan of the first one.
Kent.
It was Kent.
It was Kent.
So Kent is the three amigo.
It was Kent, the whistleblower, and Vinman.
Now, yesterday, we looked at Vinman.
They kept asking him, did you know about all of these things?
Did you know about corruption in Burisma?
Did you know that was happening?
Did you know that there was speculation that his son was corrupt?
Did you know anything about the DNC working with the embassy?
Did you know anything?
And gave this whole list.
The answer was no on absolutely everything.
Absolutely everything.
So he looks as if he is, I mean, he's supposed to be a Ukrainian expert.
This is his beat.
The name Chalupa had been floating around.
Soros' involvement in Ukraine had been known since early 2015.
Hunter Biden's involvement with Bereza had been a topic of concern in the State Department for a while, as testified by George Kent last week.
So was this guy lying or was he just incompetent?
We'll tell you more about this coming up in just a second because we have an expose on this.
It's really important tonight at 5 o'clock.
We'll tell you about it here in a second.
But it looks like Adam Schiff is now ready to ask some questions of Sonlin here there.
Over this continuum, it became more and more difficult to secure the White House meeting because more conditions were being placed on the White House meeting.
And then, of course, on July 25th, although you were not privy to the call, another condition was added, that being the investigation of the Bidens.
I was not privy to the call, and I did not know that the condition of investigating the Bidens was a condition, correct?
You saw that in the call record, correct?
It was not in any record I received.
But when you didn't.
I saw that in September, correct.
So on this continuum, the beginning of the continuum begins on May 23rd when the President instructs you to talk to Rudy?
Correct.
And you understood that as a direction by the President that you needed to satisfy the concerns that Rudy Giuliani would express to you about what the President wanted in Ukraine?
Not to me, to the entire group, Volcker, Perry, and myself, correct.
Now, in your opening statement, you confirm that there was a quid pro quo between the White House meeting and the investigations into Burisma and the 2016 election that Giuliani was publicly promoting, is that right?
Correct.
And in fact, you say that other senior officials in the State Department and the Chiefs of Staff's Office, including Mick Mulvaney, Secretary Pompeo, were aware of this quid pro quo that in order to get the White House meeting, there were going to have to be these investigations the President wanted.
Correct.
And those, again, are investigations into 2016 and burisma slash the Bidens.
2016 burisma.
The Bidens did not come up.
But you would ultimately learn that burisma meant the Bidens when you saw the call record come up.
Of course.
Today I know exactly what it means.
I didn't know at the time.
Credible, Stu?
And then on July 26th, not all pro-Democrats.
We have pointed this out multiple times now, but a lot of his testimony is actually helping the President here in some ways, in some ways, and hurting him in others.
If he chooses recounting that I take exception with is I do not recall mentioning the Bidens.
That did not enter my mind.
It was burisma in 2016 elections.
You have no reason to believe that Mr. Holmes would make that up if that's what he recalls you saying.
Burisma and the Bidens00:15:43
You have no reason to question that, do you?
I don't recall saying Biden.
I never recall saying Biden.
But the rest of Mr. Holmes' recollection is consistent with your own.
Well, I can't testify as to what Mr. Holmes might or might not have heard through the phone.
I don't know how he heard the conversation.
Are you familiar with this testimony?
Vaguely, yes.
And the only exception you take is to the mention of the name Biden.
Correct.
That could be significant.
They're going to use that.
I've got a testimony this morning that not only is it correct that the president brought up with you investigations on the phone the day after the July 25th call, but you would have been surprised had he not brought that up.
Is that right?
Right, because we had been hearing about it from Rudy, and we presumed Rudy was getting it from the president.
One of the big things that you're seeing here from Sondland in his testimony, he said the conversation after the phone conversation at the restaurant, where he said he doesn't care about Ukraine, is not included in his opening statement.
And you see the tricky shift tactic there, which is to say, do you know that are you familiar with his testimony?
He says vaguely.
He says, well, so the only thing that you disagree with is you didn't say Biden.
And he says, yeah.
Well, that, wait a minute, there's a whole other part of the call you haven't discussed at all.
And now they're going to say he agreed with that part of the testimony as if he knew what he was talking about.
Back in just a second, one minute.
Keep the testimony running in case something happens.
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We break for 10 seconds, station ID, and back to the impeachment hearings.
You've been watching a play-by-play coup, I think.
The coup coverage has been going on.
This is a well-orchestrated plan.
Now, Sonnerlin's testimony has changed things a bit and made it more real for the media to be able to go and spin it that way.
Because we're not talking about the real issue here.
Let's go back to the hearing, Sonlin.
You also had a conversation with Vice President Pence before his meeting with President Zelensky in Warsaw, and that you raised the concern you had as well that the security assistance was being withheld because of the President's desire to get a commitment from Zelensky to pursue these political investigations.
What did you say to the Vice President?
I was in a briefing with several people, and I just spoke up, and I said, it appears that everything is stalled until this statement gets made, something words to that effect, and that's what I believe to be the case based on the work that the three of us had been doing, Volcker, Perry, and myself.
And the Vice President nodded like he heard what I said, and that was pretty much it, as I recall.
And you understood that the Ukrainians were going to raise the security assistance with the Vice President at this meeting?
I didn't know what they were going to raise, but they in fact did raise it, Mr. Chairman.
Well, it was public by that point that there was a hold on the security assistance, correct?
Yeah, but I didn't know what they were going to raise.
I didn't get a pre-brief from the Ukrainians.
Well, you knew certainly they were concerned about the hold on the security assistance, right?
They were concerned, obviously.
And you wanted to help prepare the Vice President for the meeting by letting him know what you thought was responsible for the hold on the security assistance.
That's fair.
Do you recall anything else the Vice President said other than nodding his head when you made him aware of this fact?
No, I don't have a readout of that meeting, so I can't remember anything else.
And it was immediately after this meeting between the Vice President and Zelensky that you went to speak with Yermok and you told him similarly that in order to release the military assistance, they were going to have to publicly announce these investigations.
Yeah, much has been made of that meeting, and it really wasn't a meeting.
What happened was everyone got up after the bilateral meeting between President Zelensky and Vice President Pence, and people do what they normally do.
They get up, they mill around, they shake hands, and I don't know if I came over to Yermak or he came over to me, but he said, you know, what's going on here?
And I said, I don't know.
It might all be tied together now.
I have no idea.
I was presuming that it was, but it was a very short conversation.
Well, in that short conversation, as you would later relay to Mr. Morrison and Ambassador Taylor, you informed Mr. Yermok that they would need to announce these investigations in order to get the aid, did you not?
Well, Mr. Yermok was already working on those investigation or on the statement about the investigations.
And you confirmed for him that he needed to get it done if they were going to get the military aid?
did mr morrison and ambassador taylor have also related a conversation you had with the president following the warsaw meeting in which the president relayed to you that there was no quid pro quo but nevertheless unless Zelensky went to the mic and announced these investigations, they would be a stalemate over the aid.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
And that was listening to Glenn back.
It is interesting how Schiff is now tying the aid to something that the ambassador said.
I have no idea about that.
We'll get to that some more here in just a minute, more live coverage of this.
I'm going to break as fast as we can.
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So this is uh.
Now we're only we're only hearing one side.
One side.
So far, only Adam Schiff has questioned.
Now the counsel for the Democrats are talking to Ambassador Sondlin.
So we're getting a very one-sided view.
If the Republicans cannot pull his testimony apart, and even if they do at this point, the media will declare victory.
You will see today the victory laps that are going to be made by the media and every Democrat.
Everything that happens after probably the next 30 minutes will not matter to the media, will not matter to anyone.
Adam Schiff today has done a very good job of boxing the president in to a very tight box with this ambassador, and he looks credible.
And that's one of the things you have to look at is how is America going to view him?
And if they watch any of this, he is viewed.
He looks very credible.
I didn't think Vinman was credible yesterday.
I didn't think a few of the people looked credible, that you had confidence.
Yeah, this guy is, he's not saying anything but the truth.
Sondlin has come on very affable.
Both sides is cut down, you know, both sides of the issue and looks like he has not a care in the world on what he is saying.
It gives him the ability to look very, very credible.
What he has said is that there was quid pro quo.
That's a quote.
For anybody who is asking if there was quid pro quo, yes, there was.
But what he is saying is that it was about the meeting that the president and Zelensky were to have at the White House.
He then later said on about this that the president wanted an announcement that he was going to look into Burisma and the 2016 election.
Now, Trump's defense here is, yeah, because we have to look into corruption.
And all of them are saying that Trump was misguided, okay, fine, that believed that there was real corruption going on.
So it makes sense that he would say, no, I want an announcement.
I want to see it.
There's documents from Sondlin telling Zelensky that in your phone call, you must say that it's going to be a full and transparent investigation.
There's nothing wrong with any of that.
However, what Sondlin has just said is that he felt, again, it's hearsay, he felt that Trump didn't even care if there was an investigation.
He just wanted the announcement.
Quote, I'm not sure they even had to do it, meaning the investigation.
Yeah, that's very significant.
We brought this up before.
And the main thing that we keep coming back to is whether he was doing this out of U.S. interest or he's doing it out of his own personal political benefit.
And there's no way you're going to find that unless Donald Trump blurted it out on tape somewhere, right?
So the way they're going to try to prove that is to say that the ask was not for an actual investigation of this corruption.
The ask was for an announcement of it on CNN to U.S. consumers.
They wanted a public announcement that Biden looked like he was a bad guy and maybe the election wasn't on the up and up.
And we're going to look into that.
The fact that Sondlin multiple times has said it was not about the investigation.
It was about the announcement of the investigation.
And it didn't even matter if they did the investigation is something that he, Sandlin, is out there specifically trying to strengthen the case of the Democrats that this was about personal gain, not about actual corruption and correct.
There's one other thing that Adam Schiff shifted to right before the end.
He was having a conversation.
Sondlin was having a conversation after a meeting with Biden.
I'm sorry, with Pence in Poland.
And after the meeting, the Ukrainian guy came to the ambassador and said, okay, what's happening here?
Because I just heard that the aid is now being held up.
Is this part of this?
And he said, look, I don't know.
Now, he did say at that time, I began to assume that it was.
But what he said was, I just needed to break this logjam.
And he told the guy from Ukraine at this meeting, after this meeting, look, I don't know what it is, but we just have to break this logjam.
So he said, I'm just trying to get everybody to do what they have to do to be able to break the log jam.
I don't care what it is.
But then Schiff changed the language and he said, so what the president was asking for, and you said you have to break the log jam, did that log jam now include the money?
Well, yes, it's a log jam for whatever was clogging up the system, but it included the money, yes.
Did Donald Trump write that check himself?
No.
Was that an official act that the president was holding back?
Well, yes, I presume that it was.
That's all presumption.
But then Schiff says this.
So was this a meeting at the White House just to meet?
No, it was supposed to be a working meeting.
So this was also an official act of the president.
Well, yes, we wanted to have an official meeting between them.
So this was an official act.
Yes.
What he's driving to is the bribery case.
The president was holding back official acts.
Basically, basically, this is the Hillary Clinton.
They're making donations to the Clinton Foundation, and then they find themselves in a room with Hillary Clinton having a meeting.
Okay, it's basically that story, except there's no Clinton Foundation involved.
It's just, I want you to make this announcement.
And the Democrats care this time.
But that's what's happening.
Now, Sondlin is going to be wrapping up with the Democratic Council.
And then we'll probably take a break and they'll start again at midnight when nobody is watching.
But let's take a little bit more of the example of the big stuff.
The Biden investigation that Rudy Giuliani was pushing.
Do you recall that?
I don't.
I recall Burisma, not Biden.
But do you recall saying, at least referring to an investigation that Rudy Giuliani was pushing?
Biden Investigation Confusion00:05:06
Is that something that you likely would have said?
I would have, yes.
Now, even if you don't recall specifically mentioning the Biden investigation to David Holmes, we know that it was certainly on President Trump's mind.
Because just the day before, in his call with President Zelensky, he mentions specifically the Biden investigation.
And I want to show you that exhibit or that excerpt from the call on July 25th where President Trump says, the other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that.
So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.
Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it, it sounds horrible to me.
President Zelensky then responds with a reference to the company that he's referring to.
And two witnesses yesterday said that when President Zelensky actually said the company, he said Burisma.
So you would agree that regardless of whether you knew about the connection to the Bidens, at the very least, that you now know that that's what President Trump wanted at the time through the Burisma investigation.
I now know it all, of course.
And at this time, you were aware of the President's desire, along with Rudy Giuliani, to do these investigations, including the 2016 election interference investigation.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Okay.
Stop for a second.
I just want to point out before we take a break.
This is where this should focus.
And the president has made an error, in my opinion, on going for there was no quid pro quo.
Of course, all of life is a quid pro quo.
You know, marriage is a quid pro quo.
I'm going to do these things and you'll be my wife.
You'll do those things and I'll be your husband.
You stop doing those things and start sleeping with other people.
That wasn't in the agreement.
So all of life is a quid pro quo, but he has made it about that.
So he has given them a huge win today.
But this line of questioning is important because you have to assume. that there is absolutely nothing that is in the national interest to even look into regarding the 2016 campaign and the Bidens.
Now, remember, Joe Biden's son's partner, Christopher Hines, John Kerry's stepson, he is on record saying, I got as far away from that burism deal as I could.
He quit and said, guys, you are in dangerous territory here.
So to assume that there is nothing to be found and there is no reason to even look into the 2016 election is nonsense, is total nonsense.
And it's funny because you're hearing a lot of this separation between Biden and Burisma.
Like Trump wanted Biden, but I heard them say burisma, which would have been legitimate, but not Biden.
So, and it's a hilarious distinction because it's not only being made by Sondlin today and others yesterday, it's been by almost every witness that was hostile to the president.
And what they say is Burisma was well known for corruption.
They were very well known in Ukraine for corruption, and we knew they were corrupt.
However, going after Biden is way over the top.
But it is not, especially if you look at the quote from the phone call.
Biden bragged he got the prosecutor fired from looking into Burisma.
He bragged about it.
That doesn't seem good to me.
Right.
And of course these things are tied.
You can't say it's okay to investigate Burisma, but it doesn't involve the Bidens at all.
That would, of course, be part of the investigation if you investigated Burisma.
You have the vice president of the United States who's influencing policy.
You have the policy that the vice president was executing was hurting the number one competitor of Burisma, and his son works at the freaking company.
How can you not tie those together?
I will tell you right now, I have heard of a giant mouse in pants and red shoes that is walking around in Orlando right now.
And you can look into it, but you are not allowed to look into Disney or Walt Disney or the Walt Disney company.
But I can investigate the mouse walking around Orlando.
You are not allowed to attach that crazy story by itself of a giant four-foot mouse walking around with Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Company, or Disney World.
Competitor Policy Concerns00:08:55
Amazing.
I mean, and you can understand why they would try to get out of this themselves.
Listen, how crazy he is.
He's like a four-foot mouse.
I want to look into it.
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck Program.
Today is, I think, a bad day for the president on Quid Pro Quo.
This is why we have been saying, stop saying there's no quid pro quo.
It's a bad day for him on that.
We haven't seen the cross-examination yet.
And that's when things fell apart for Blazy Ford.
I'm not saying that Sonlin is Blazy Ford, but let's see how he stands up against cross-examination.
One difference is he remembers the country he was in when the incident took place.
Yes, he does.
Yes, he does.
He seems to have some of the facts going for him.
However, the other thing, the impeachment trial, let's say this, the coup that I think is actually happening with the State Department, what they are covering up, they are using this to impeach Donald Trump, and I think he walked into a trap by standing on no quid pro quo.
I don't think that this is enough to impeach, but some people may.
What's disturbing to me is we as a nation are not talking about what the real story is.
Tonight, I'm going to show you how just in the last couple of days, George Soros had to have made an awful lot of money because he gained an awful lot of power.
If you want to see what is really happening tonight at 5 o'clock, I'm going to show you some of the people that have been giving testimony in the impeachment hearings and cross-check that with what we've been saying that we found from our three Ukrainian specials.
And I'm going to show you how George Soros is actually very involved in everything that you heard over the last couple of days.
We'll give you that and also a recap of Ambassador Sonlin and his testimony and the cross-examination a little later on after it has, of course, happened at 5 o'clock.
But we will give you a very, very different look at what is really happening.
I can tell you now, the press today is going to run a victory lap and say, yes, it's an open and shut case.
There it is.
There was quid pro quo.
They are going to tout this day as the day they brought down the president.
The president must make this about national interest and what was really going on in Ukraine.
It's all there.
More in a minute.
You're listening to Glenn Beck.
All right, we're going to get into the impeachment.
The impeachment hearings have just broken.
President Trump never told me that aid was tied to an announcement of investigations.
We did get that.
Not a good morning for the president, mainly because I think they have played it wrong.
But I don't think anything new other than this is they're going to use this to use it as a smoking gun.
And you'll see a victory lap going around today.
We'll talk more about it here in just a second.
Also, Pat's joining us because he watched the whole thing as well.
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All right, we just heard from Ambassador Sonlin, who was a very credible witness that gave his one side.
We haven't had the cross-examination yet, and that's where it could all change and, you know, change direction here.
But it's not going to matter with the press.
The press already has their story.
I'd be surprised how many of them even show up for the cross-examination because they are going to use this as the smoking gun.
We'll explain it to you coming up in one minute.
This is the Glenbeck program.
So my wife says to me, I want an X-Chair for Craigman.
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I mean, listen to the tone of your voice.
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So, Pat Bray is joining us.
By the way, happy birthday, Pat.
No, thank you.
I'd get you a gift, but you have the pants.
Office Chair Ad Break00:15:55
Didn't I give those back on your birthday?
Nope.
It's inconsiderate of me.
It is.
We've been giving the same gift to each other since, what, 1989, I think.
And it's a pair of lovely golf pants that I bought Pat originally in 1989.
They're pink Paisley golf pants from Ralph Lorraine.
Very nice.
Well, very colorful.
Yeah, so I gave them to him.
I actually believe they're Dolce and Gabbana because.
Really?
Yeah.
That's an expensive joke.
Yeah, but it is, but they're extremely weird, and that fits Dolce and Gabbana perfectly.
No, I'm telling you, it's positive.
I know at one point, some of the pants we were giving back and forth were Dolce and Gabbana.
I think I gave you a shirt to go with the pants, and then you kept the shirt.
But anyway, so we've been giving the same gift back and forth to each other since 1989 and or 1990.
And I didn't get my.
I really thought I gave that back to you.
Nope.
But repurpose it again.
Last year.
What?
I'll have to get you another pair of shit.
She's skipping your birthday.
Anyway, so Pat, you've been watching the impeachment.
What is your thought today?
Kind of like yours.
It seems like a bad day for the president.
And I don't, I just don't understand why they've gone this direction the whole time.
You mean Trump?
Yes, why Trump has insisted it's not quid pro quo.
Who cares if it's quid pro quo?
Tell them it's in the national interest.
Because it was.
And it was.
And that's what.
See, here's what Schiff has done today is he's moved it two steps.
He's made two moves.
He's got somebody now saying, yep, definitely.
I talked to the president.
I got it from Rudy Giuliani.
It was quid pro quo.
If this didn't happen, he would not have a meeting with Zelensky.
Now, he later tied that to the aid, but that is hearsay because that was something that the ambassador said, I just assumed that that's what it was.
So there is no evidence that it was tied to the aid.
But you could make that assumption as Ambassador Sautland did.
So what he did was he gave them the quid pro quo today.
At least with the meeting.
With the meeting.
But did you see what he had the ambassador testify to towards the end?
The Democratic attorney said, or Schiff said, so this was a working meeting, though, right?
This was an official working meeting.
Oh, yeah.
And he said, yes, it was.
And so you were planning on doing work and trying to really work.
Yes.
So this was an official presidential duty.
So he moved this piece two spots down the board.
And the president shouldn't have ever let them have that.
No.
And he only allowed them to have that because he kept insisting and probably still will, there was no quid pro quo.
There was an off-ramp, however.
The off-ramp was, I think, the first part of that.
Oh, well, if that's what you meant by quid pro quo, a meeting?
I thought you were talking about the money.
But the meeting, yeah, quid pro quo.
Right.
But you better have a legitimate reason why that money was held up.
Right.
It's going to be hard for him to say, sure, yeah, that was a quid pro quo.
The point here is that what are we arguing about at this juncture, right?
A meeting?
Like, I mean, that is like, what age are we?
I think that's way out.
If it's all about the meeting, I don't care if that's a working meeting or not.
You can't impeach him over a meeting.
Can you?
I mean, it's silly.
It's ridiculous.
It's just, it's so.
But he's not, but that's not the way it's going to be spun.
Remember, impeachment is not a legal proceeding.
It is a political proceeding.
So you have to convince the American people.
Donald Trump has given him the ammunition.
He's armed the media with the ammunition.
Clear-cut.
Yes, it was quid pro quo.
They're not going to take it any further.
They won't care about the meeting.
And even if he didn't say that, they would lie about it.
But they have him on tape saying it multiple times with all the flavor that they want.
And it is a logical leap from the meeting to then what happened to the aid?
Why was the aid held up?
It was a logical leap from Sondland.
Yes.
Which is what he's saying.
I was like, yeah, well, obviously this is part of it.
Right.
And so the American people will take that leap.
And that shuts down everything else, everything else of what this is about.
2016.
What's the State Department's role in these riots all around the world, including Ukraine?
What was happening with civil society 2.0?
What was happening with the 2016 election?
What happened to the $7 billion?
All of that is gone.
It's honestly like somebody burned down a house, and we're listening to two attorneys argue with the guy who left the paint thinner open and then was smoking around it.
And all they're doing is asking the painter, yes, but was the living room eggshell or white?
That has nothing to do with anything.
It has nothing to do with this.
But that's the president's fault.
And it's strange that they haven't seen that along the way.
How is it possible?
I think everybody did.
He, with all his advisors, didn't say, look, this is the wrong tack.
We've got to go to U.S. interest.
I don't understand.
Inside sources have told me that they have been saying that.
To the president?
Yes.
And he won't go with it.
No.
He never wants to give up credit.
Strange, right?
And I do think after this, he will come out again and say there was no quid pro quo.
I agree.
Because he'll say it wasn't in the call.
He will.
And we still, at this point, don't have a transcript of Trump saying it, right?
What we have is a very close aide, a million, you know, seven-figure donor to the president who said that it was said.
And he's incredibly from Giuliani.
And he's credible in a way that his presentation, as you watch him, he seems credible.
He's credible for the media and the American people to consume it and deem he's credible.
The clips will play.
He could be the biggest liar in the world, but he will not be spun that way.
And his clips don't look like Vinman looked a little squirrely.
Yeah.
He didn't look shady.
He just looks squirrely.
You watch him and you're like, oh, I don't know.
Vinman did not have any of that approach to him at all.
And to be clear, he said some things that have been beneficial, I think, to the president.
And this line is carved out pretty well in that he basically put Sondland put all the blame to Giuliani, largely, and said Giuliani was doing these things, but they were at the president's request, but Giuliani was the problem.
Giuliani is the one who was saying explicit quid pro quo.
Giuliani, Giuliani, Giuliani.
Now, he's not saying that he doesn't believe Giuliani, that Giuliani didn't really get the word from the president.
He's not saying that.
But the president may very well say that.
He may say, I don't know what Rudy was doing.
Yeah, maybe Rudy was telling people that.
I wasn't telling people that.
He could throw him under the bus.
And we 100% at this point know that there was a quid pro quo for these things, at least according to the Ukrainians, who definitely felt that outwardly from Sondland.
Have you noticed that until today, when Sondland kept saying it, they've dropped the quid pro quo thing and went to bribery?
Yeah.
And I think that's because the American people don't necessarily know what quid pro quo is.
They're not up on their Latin as much as maybe we should be.
They did a focus group last week or the week before, and they said, you know, which, what does it mean?
And nobody knew what it meant and nobody cared what it meant.
But when they said, how about the word bribery?
They all went, oh, that's really bad.
Right.
And that's why they changed it.
It was all changed again for a focus group.
And I think that was changed for Al Sharpton, too, because the president has been proven to have a cute prom.
He did not say that to him.
Quid Skid Bro.
The president has been doing Bribery.
Too many Bradberries.
So I think in part this is for Al Sharpton's Sunday broadcast.
Yeah.
So he doesn't have to deal with that stuff.
I will say it's also in the Constitution, right?
Outwardly.
The word is in the Constitution as opposed to quid programming.
Well, they tested high crimes, misdemeanors, bribery.
Yep.
Quid pro quo.
And there's no chance that Al Sharpton could ever pronounce it.
No chance at all.
No.
Well, I can.
Can he do high crimes and misdemeanors?
Is that positive on that?
It's probably pretty difficult.
And I will tell you.
High crimes and Mrs. Was meaner.
What?
Wait, what?
Maybe Mrs. Wiener.
Mrs. Wiener.
They know Mrs. Wiener.
What's her name?
We're all right.
Oh, right.
Let me just leave you with this idea.
I want to play the audio from Good Morning America.
Now listen to this audio, what they say.
Well, our poll also shows that 21% of Americans have made up their minds after the first week of testimony.
That suggests that they were already locked in or that really the testimony they've heard is enough.
But that's a big percentage who still have to make up their minds.
And 70% saying the president did something wrong.
The president keeps saying the call was perfect.
He did nothing wrong.
Our poll suggests that may go down in history along with I did not have sex with that woman as a very ineffective presidential defense.
Okay, so I believe that to be accurate.
Really?
You think only 20% of people have made their mind up on this?
I don't think it was even close to that.
No, What I'm saying is the statement, I didn't have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
You're saying you believe that you never had sex with her.
Well, I'm pretty sure.
Pretty sure.
It would never be 100%.
These things happen.
I think that it is, I think that this, there was no quid pro quo, is going to go down in the same way as a bad presidential defense.
And we'll all remember no quid pro quo, and it will become a joke.
But it will not harm the president.
It won't bring him down.
It will not bring him down.
That's what I predict from this.
That ABC is right.
But what I think they're thinking is, and that brought the impreachment.
No, look to the end of that.
Nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
Yeah.
And the funny thing, too, is we're talking about him changing the quid pro quo argument, but he hasn't even changed the perfect call argument yet.
He's still on the call.
He's perfect.
So I don't think that's going to be his pattern here.
All right.
Happy birthday, Pat.
Thank you.
Thank you.
38 already.
38.
Wow.
That's really strange.
I've got children who are 38.
Science doesn't know how it happened.
That is weird.
Welcome into it.
Men can have periods.
That's right.
You know, 38.
Babies can have adults or teenagers.
Because I have teenagers and I'm only 12.
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10 seconds, station ID.
Hey, you sick freak.
Welcome to the program.
We want to go back to now Devin Nunes, the Republican, for cross-examination with the ambassador, Ambassador Sonlin.
In the 2016 election.
Now they know it.
They know it's true because we have financial records that show it.
So they were, the Democrats were heavily involved working with Ukrainians to dirty up the Trump campaign in 2016.
So Ambassador, I want to go through just a few of the incidents that we know.
I know you may not know all about them.
You may know about them now.
But I want to walk through some of those examples of why the president may be very upset with Ukraine and think that they're a country that's out to get him, as I think both you've said that and Ambassador Volcker have said that from that May 23rd meeting.
The first question I have is: were you aware of the anti-Trump efforts by DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa?
I'm not aware of it.
So in 2000, there was a 2017 article that also quotes Ukrainian parliamentarian Artemenko saying, quote, it was clear that they were supporting, meaning Ukraine, supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy, and they did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team to publicly supporting her to criticizing Trump.
I think that they simply didn't meet with the Trump campaign because they thought Hillary would win.
Do you know that Ukrainian official by any chance that you stated that?
Were you aware that then-Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. Chalet wrote an op-ed in the Hill during the 2016 presidential campaign criticizing then-candidate Trump?
Not aware.
But you know that now.
Chalet Op-Ed Discovery00:04:13
There's no credibility here.
How can you go ahead and keep this up, please?
How could you probably one of the more disturbing ones is the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister, Avakov, mocked and disparaged then-candidate Trump on Facebook and Twitter.
Were you aware that Serhi Lashchenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, admitted that part of his motivation in spreading the information about the so-called Black Ledger, a disputed document purporting to reveal corruption by a former Trump campaign official, was to undermine the Trump candidacy?
I wasn't aware.
So you may be familiar, the Black Ledger was used in the 2016 election to dirty up a campaign associate, and later Mueller didn't use that as evidence in his report on election meddling.
So knowing all these facts from high-ranking Ukrainian officials, Ambassador, probably makes a little more sense now as to why the president may think that there's problems with Ukraine and that Ukraine was out to get him.
Is that correct?
I understand your point, yes, Chairman.
Because you said in your deposition, and I'm just going to make sure this was your, let's read it back to you on page 279 for your legal team, quote, they are all corrupt.
This is what you said about your conversation with the president.
So this is your words about what the president told you.
This is the May 23rd meeting.
That's correct.
They are all corrupt.
They are all terrible people.
And you know, I don't want to spend any time with that.
And he also said they tried to take me down.
That's correct.
When they tried to take him down, I think any logical person that wants to do two plus two equals four games would say that that was in the 2016 election, wasn't it?
I believe that's what he was referring to.
Yes, ranking member.
So during all this time, and remember, in the spring, the Democrats' Russia hoax witch hunt is still ongoing.
They're still claiming that President Trump is a Russian agent.
They're out to get President Trump at the time.
His personal attorney is then interested in trying to figure out, okay, who are these Ukrainians that are trying to get to my candidate?
As those of us, the Republicans on this committee, who were also trying to get to the bottom of who were the sources in the steel dossier that the Democrats had paid for, the House Republicans wanted to know that all through the spring and even the summer of, and even as of today, we'd still like to know.
That's why we've subpoenaed him.
This is on cross-examination, and it hurts Sondlin to not know all of these charges.
Is the Glenbank program?
Because it does change the context.
More in just a second.
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Johnson Email Questions00:14:17
All right, tonight, the whole review of everything that's happened today and what the real story is.
BlazeTV.com, go to the promo code Glenn, get $10 off.
We're back now with a cross-examination of House Intelligence Committee members questioning Ambassador Sondland in the public hearing.
Here is Sonlin's testimony to the Republicans.
Okay.
And then that was May 23rd, and then you never had any personal communications with Giuliani until August, right?
That's correct.
And Volcker was handling Ambassador Volcker was Volcker, Perry, and others.
Okay.
Ambassador Volcker, you testified he's a professional diplomat, correct?
Yes, he is.
And you said you had a great relationship with him?
I do, yes.
You said he was a very smart guy?
Yes.
Ambassador Ivanovich said he's a brilliant diplomat, in fact.
Do you agree with that?
He's pretty smart.
You stated that he's one of those people I'd hand my wallet to?
I would.
And so, did you hear his testimony yesterday?
I did not.
Okay, because he was.
He was busy getting ready for you.
He didn't have any evidence of any of these preconditions.
And he was the one most engaged with the Ukrainians, wasn't he?
Yes.
Okay.
I mean, you testified, and you know, this was his full-time job, although he was doing it for free.
He was the special envoy.
And you testified you came in and out of the events, correct?
That's correct.
Okay.
Your deposition, we asked you about your communications with the president.
And we asked you whether there were so many that it would be impossible to chronicle.
And you said no, it wasn't that many.
And we went down the path of building a list of communications you remember with the president, right?
Correct.
We talked about May 23rd in the Oval Office.
Yes.
You mentioned on July 25th before you went to Ukraine you called the President, but there was no material information on the 25th call, correct?
Not that I recall.
Okay, then last Friday, Mr. Holmes came in, and I guess his testimony refreshed your recollection.
Yeah, what refreshed my recollection was when he mentioned ASAP Rocky, then all of a sudden it came back to me.
And talking about the President Zelensky loving the President and so forth?
Well, the whole thing sort of came back to me after he mentioned ASAP Rocky.
And then the next time we tried to unpack this, the next time you talked with the president was on the telephone, was September 9th, according to your deposition, right?
I may have even spoken to him on September 6th, but again, I just don't have all the records.
I wish I could get them.
Then I could answer your questions very easily.
Okay.
But on September 9th, at least at your deposition, you were extremely clear.
You called the President, you said he was feeling cranky that day, right?
He seemed very cranky to me.
And you said, in no uncertain terms, and this is on the heels of the Bill Taylor text, right?
Right.
And why don't you tell us, what did the president say to you on September 9th that you remember?
Well, words to the effect, I decided to ask the president the question in an open-ended fashion because there were so many different scenarios floating around as to what was going on with Ukraine.
So rather than ask the president nine different questions, is it this, is it this, is it that, I just said, what do you want from Ukraine?
I may have even used a four-letter word.
And he said, I want nothing.
I want no quid pro quo.
I just want Zelensky to do the right thing, to do what he ran on, or words to that effect.
And that gave me the impetus to respond to Ambassador Taylor with the text that I sent.
As I said to Mr. Goldman, it was not an artfully written text.
I should have been more specific, put it in quotes, something like that.
But basically, I wanted Mr. Taylor, Ambassador Taylor, to pick up the ball and take it from there.
I had gone as far as I could go.
And you believe the President, correct?
You know what?
I'm not going to characterize whether I believed or didn't believe.
I was just trying to convey what he said on the phone.
Why would you characterize the aid that he was pauling?
That there was quid pro quo for the news article for the military aid when he had nothing to go on.
Talking about it.
So by that point in time, the president had been receiving calls from senators.
He had been getting pressure to lift the aid, correct?
That's what I understand, yes.
I want to turn back to your opener on page five under when you talk about, in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations, correct?
Correct.
And you acknowledge that this is speculation, right?
It was a presumption.
Okay.
It was a guess, in fact, I think you even said this morning.
Well, I want to say that it goes back to Mr. Goldman's point or Chairman Schiff's, 2 plus 2 equaled 4 in my mind at that point.
Okay, but you didn't have any evidence of that, correct?
Other than the aid wasn't being released and we weren't getting anywhere with the Ukrainians.
Okay, but did Ambassador Volcker clue you in that that was the issue?
I mean, this is a pretty high, I mean, this is a pretty serious conclusion you've reached without precise evidence.
Well, I sent that email to Secretary Pompeo to set up a potential meeting between President Trump and President Zelensky in Warsaw.
And when I referred to the log jam, I referred to the log jam in a very inclusive way.
Everything was jammed up at that point.
And Secretary Pompeo essentially gave me the green light to brief President Zelensky about making those announcements.
Okay, we can turn to that.
And then that was your email dated.
What date?
Do you have the page there?
Well, your email to Secretary Pompeo.
was that august 11th 16th August 22nd.
Riveting page selection here.
No, it's great.
I love it.
And then they both read.
Okay, so you're asking Secretary Pompeo whether we should block time and work.
I mean, is there any discussion of specific investigations?
Is there any discussion of Biden or Burisma or anything linking to aid in this email that you sent to Pompeo?
No, this was a proposed briefing that I was going to give President Zelensky.
And I was going to call President Zelensky and ask him to say what is in this email.
And I was asking essentially President Pompeo's permission to do that, to which he said yes.
So but at that point in time, we're talking about investigations into the origins of the 2016 election.
We're not talking about anything to do with Joe Biden.
Joe Biden did not come up.
Okay.
Stepping back a page to your email to the State Department on August 11th, you email Secretary Pompeo and you say, Kurt and I negotiated a statement from Zelensky to be delivered for our review in a day or two.
And the question I have here is that, I mean, that statement never was issued.
And in fact, Ambassador Volcker has testified that he didn't think it was a good idea, and ultimately, the Ukrainians didn't think it was a good idea.
And so the statement never reached a finalized state.
That's correct.
But even if it had, it doesn't talk about Bidens or Burisma or anything insidious, correct?
Well, the statement, as I recall, would have mentioned the 2016 elections slash DNC server and burisma.
Okay.
It would not have mentioned the Bidens.
And have you heard Ambassador Volcker, how he talks about what might be an investigation into burisma?
Outwardly tied to each other.
Okay.
I mean, he has said that if there were Ukrainians engaged in violations of Ukrainian law, then the prosecutor general with the new administration ought to investigate that.
Did Ambassador Volcker ever relate that to you?
No, we just talked in generic terms about, quote, investigating burisma.
Okay.
But it had nothing to do with Vice President Biden.
I had never heard Vice President Biden come up until very late in the game.
When?
I don't recall the exact date, but when it all sort of came together, maybe after the transcript of the July 25th call.
I don't know.
I don't know the exact date when I made the connection.
Apparently a lot of people did not make the connection.
Okay.
I want to turn to the letter from Senator Johnson.
When he heard about some of these issues in the whole of the aid, he called the President.
He called the President on August 31st.
It's page 6 of his letter.
Senator Johnson states, or he writes, I asked him, the president, whether there was some kind of arrangement where Ukraine would take some action and the hole would be lifted.
Without hesitation, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed.
Senator Johnson quotes the president saying, no, and he prefaced it with a different word.
No way.
I would never do that.
Who told you that?
Senator Johnson says, I have accurately characterized the president's reaction as adamant, vehement, and angry.
Senator Johnson's telephone call with the president wasn't a public event.
It was capturing a genuine moment with the president.
And he had, at this point in time, on August 31st, he was adamant, vehement, and angry that there was no connections to aid.
There were no preconditions.
Yeah, I had my meeting with Senator Johnson where, again, I had made the presumption that I had made to both Mr. Yermak and the email I had sent to Secretary Pompeo.
And we were sort of ruminating about what was going on.
And Senator Johnson, I believe, said, I'm going to call President Trump and find out.
And then he obviously had that phone call.
I wasn't involved in that phone call.
Okay.
But you have no reason to disbelieve that wasn't the way it went down, right?
No, no reason to disbelieve Senator Johnson.
And now that you've had some time since your deposition and you submitted an addendum relating to the Warsaw get-together with Mr. Yarmack.
Someone doing some electric shaving on this.
Are we missing a lot of your communications with the president?
I haven't had that many communications with the president.
And in fact, a bunch of the call records that I have had access to, just the short period of time on the call indicates I never got through.
In other words, I was put on hold for one or two minutes and the call never connected.
So I really can't give you an accurate count of how many conversations.
Plus, Mr. Castor, I've had a lot of conversations with the president about completely unrelated matters that have nothing to do with Ukraine.
So, but you don't think we're missing any material conversations that you have at the president?
I don't recall any material conversations today as I'm sitting here.
Or with Rudy.
This is actually really good cross-examination here because what he's saying is, look, you jumped to a conclusion.
Then you wrote to Pompeo and said, hey, you know, you have to do this.
But you weren't told by the president.
Nobody verified that.
And in fact, as you are spreading this around, the president is talking to people and he is vehement.
No, that's not what I want.
And in fact, when you called him, he said, no, that's there is no quid pro quo.
I don't want that.
I want them to do just the right thing.
This is different.
This is all the testimony that he just gave was that Rudy Giuliani said he's not meeting with the president unless he gets a statement from them.
But you could excuse that because of all of the things that the president felt Ukraine was doing with good reason.
He says in May, I have no reason to meet with these people.
They're bad people.
They're all corrupt.
Why should I meet with them?
I want to see them do something.
But when it comes to holding back all of the aid, it's all coming from Sundlin.
He's the source of saying, oh, it must be that.
And he's testifying here.
I didn't have any evidence of that.
He said, I believe it.
I believe it.
He said it was a logical conclusion of the evidence.
Withholding Aid Reasons00:02:36
Correct.
Well, I've got logical conclusions as well.
That doesn't make them accurate unless you can back them up.
You know, what the media is saying is a conspiracy theory.
No, no, we've shown you the documents.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's all written down by them.
All the leadership.
All these people who are testifying, we have their documents.
That stops that from going from a theory or I just two plus two equals four to actual evidence.
He doesn't have that.
He has two plus two equals four.
Why are you looking at me that's way stupid?
He has two plus two equals four.
That's usually.
No, I tells a good story.
No, but he doesn't have anything to back that equation up.
You know how people are like, oh, two plus two equals four.
Well, two plus two equals five if I can show you how I got there.
No.
No, it doesn't.
You could say two plus two equals four, but if you can you back that up, can you actually back that up and show all the people who say it equals five because I got there this way?
Can you back it up?
It requires actual evidence.
It requires things instead of saying, well, I just thought it was.
No.
Is it or not?
All right.
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Media Spin on Impeachment00:00:55
You're listening to Glenn Beck.
We're going to be monitoring this impeachment hearing today.
Today is an important day to pay attention to it.
We know how the media will spin it, and Sondland gave them some really great stuff.
However, in cross-examination, some really good things are coming up as well in the president's defense.
We'll have all of it at 5 o'clock only on Blaze TV.
Make sure you join me.
Don't want to miss because we show you another connection to Deep State.