On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” network legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said today’s impeachment hearings were “a graveyard for Republican talking points” in defense of President Donald Trump.
Toobin said, “Today was a graveyard for Republican talking points. Let’s start with three of them. One, the idea that all of this information here was just second-hand. The morning was devoted almost entirely to the president’s phone call.”
He continued, “The detailed analysis of what the president said just established how clearly he was doing an exchange: aid, meeting, in return for investigation of Bidens.”
He added, “Second point, the idea that this couldn’t be an exchange because Ukraine didn’t know that the aid and the meeting were being withheld because of the failure to investigate. Not true. Vindman said it wasn’t true, Volker basically said it wasn’t true. And third, the idea ‘What’s this big deal because Ukraine got the money anyway? Ukraine didn’t have to do an investigation … But the reason that the president had to give the aid is because he got caught. The timing of the whistleblower complaint comes on September 9th. They get a notice that they’ve been busted. And it’s only then that the aid is released.”
He concluded, “The reason the aid was released is because they got caught in this scheme.”
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