What A Day - Tyler Perry’s “Gordon Sondland”

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

During his impeachment hearing, Gordon Sondland confirms the quid-pro-quo and says his orders came from the top dog: El Presidente. We discuss that and the testimony of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper. Ten democratic candidates faced off in a rapid-fire two-hour debate at Tyler Perry Studios in Georgia. We discuss highlights including some choice Booker-on-Biden weed slams. And in headlines: Zuck’s Trump dinner, Google’s union-busting, and BTS gets no noms (!!).

it's thursday november 21st i'm akilah hughes i'm gideon resnick and this is what a day the space mountain of slow news day. I don't know what to talk about. Someone in my neighborhood threw away a bunch of perfectly good looking mangoes. Wow, that does seem like the most exciting thing I heard about. Yeah, it went around, frankly. It's disturbing. And yeah, there was a pretty massive day for the impeachment inquiry and the 2020 presidential election.

Yeah, man, you really hit him with that psych. Okay, so yesterday was the fourth day of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. The day began with the ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, a man who smiles like the dancing guy from the Six Flags commercials. Yeah, he smells a lot. He was confirming that, yes, there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine and it was directed by Trump. All right. Ball game. We did it. Honestly, I don't even. That's the news. That's the end of news.

I'm going on. We're done. There will never be news again. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's not true. But Sondland was followed in the afternoon by State Department official David Hale and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper, who testified that Ukrainian officials were indeed aware of the U.S. freeze on military aid, undermining a key talking point that Republicans have been pushing that have, you know, just been

used to defend Trump's actions. Gideon, I want to talk about Sondland first. As we said, he confirmed the quid pro quo, which again, wow. But what else stuck out to you from the testimony? Yeah, so the other main point from Sondland's testimony was that he characterized this entire action that they were taking as nothing rogue, right? That it came directly from the president. And so essentially, there was a group that was working on this entire pressure campaign with Rudy Giuliani, and it was all at the behest of President Trump, which Solomon talks about right here. Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker, 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. So basically, yes, Sondland is confirming the quid pro quo, making matters worse. He's looping in all these other people as well. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said, signed off on it. Vice President Pence was told about a link between the military aid and the investigations. So now this is sort of just expanding outwards and outwards. And basically what that also means is that contrary to what some other people

were testifying to, there were not these two irregular Ukraine channels, at least in his estimation. Just one big corrupt one. Just one big corrupt one where, as he put it, everybody was in the loop on it. So he's implicating a lot of other people. Now, the other thing that's going on with Sondland is, and this is something that Republicans talked about to a degree, is that he's not necessarily the most, how do we say this, the best witness that could be put up there.

Because as we know, he changed from the no quid pro quo to the yes quid pro quo before this testimony on Wednesday. He also admittedly said that he wasn't the best at taking notes. He didn't have access to all the notes. But still, the facts that he laid forth

and some of the texts and emails that he actually presented were quite damning in and of themselves. Yeah. Well, everyone has confirmed the central facts. It's been repeatedly, every witness is like, yep, that's pretty much all that happened. So what was the Republican response like? Because this is definitely, I think, the most contentious, most damning day so far of testimony. Yeah. I mean, the thing that Republicans focused on, the one argument they had against Sondland is that he said that Trump never explicitly drew the connection between the

investigations and the security aid. But Sondland said that his impression from speaking to Giuliani throughout this whole process was that that was how they were viewing it. And he also said something else that was quite important, which was that it might have been enough for Trump to just push the Ukrainian president to make this announcement that there were investigations. And the easiest thing that Trump could do with that is basically say, well, look, for an entire year, I've been talking about the fact that Biden and his son are corrupt. Now, look, the Ukrainian president's agreeing with me. And then they wouldn't really have to go forward with real investigations after that because Trump has already won in that sense.

Here's a part of Solomon talking about that. I never heard Mr. Goldman, anyone say that the investigations had to start or had to be completed? The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced in some form. And that form kept changing. Announced publicly? Announced publicly. Uh-huh. And Republicans this whole time have been saying, well, the president just wanted to root out corruption in Ukraine. He wanted these

investigations to go forth and actually, you know, cleanse them of their corruptness. Well, if Sondland is telling the truth here, he's basically saying they didn't give a shit if they actually did investigations at all. Like corruptions really doesn't matter. It's just the optics. Yeah, right. Got it. Well, the afternoon had more testimony, this time from Laura Cooper, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. I'm sure she just confirmed Trump's assertion that there was no quid pro quo. Everybody went home early so that they could rest up to watch the debates, right? Yeah, yeah. Everybody needed to hightail it to Atlanta. Well, so Cooper actually testified that she was aware of multiple communications between Ukrainian embassy officials and members of her staff in which those officials

asked about the delivery of the security aid as far back as July. Here's her talking about that. In July, I became aware of a hold being placed on obligation of the State Department's Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, and DOD's USAI funds. In a series of interagency meetings, I heard that the President had directed the Office of Management and Budget to hold the funds because of his concerns about corruption in Ukraine. Let me say at the outset that I have never discussed this or any other matter with the president and never heard directly from him about this matter. Okay, so Republicans have been

arguing that Ukraine did not know about the hold until it was publicly reported on August 28. Therefore, when there was this supposedly perfect innocuous phone call between Trump and Zelensky, it would have been impossible that there would have even been an implication that this was being withheld in exchange for the investigations. Now she's saying we knew about it in July. Unfortunate. OK, so impeachment in the House now seems like a foregone conclusion, right? Like they've got all the things that they need. Democrats are pretty much like, well, that's the game. Yeah. But in is there any sense of whether Republicans might start to crack have their I am Spartacus stand for something moment? I haven't seen evidence yet. I mean, but I

think that there is sort of, you know, people were kind of clowning on Devin Nunes his face in that one moment, I this sort of like crestfallen nature where they realize that, you know, the more that was exposed in these hearings and testimony, the less good it's been for them. I think that what Republicans are going to sort of focus on is the fact that, OK, even if this investigation was floated out and even if like the aid was withheld, neither of them actually happened. Yeah. The people got aid was withheld, neither of them actually happened. Yeah, the people got their money. So yeah, oh, well, yeah. So it's basically like, if the Home Alone 2 robbers were like, oh, well, Kevin didn't fall for any of our movie traps. So

I guess it's not illegal that we broke into his house and set them. Yeah, all's well that ends well is what they're saying. But you know, Democrats are obviously focusing on what happened in that interim span of time, and they're saying. But you know, Democrats are obviously focusing on what happened in that interim span of time, and they're calling it bribery. Now, the other thing, you know, after Wednesday was over, there's going to be some pressure on some of these other people that we haven't heard yet in these testimonies or haven't even been called. That's Pompeo Mulvaney and our mustachioed friend, John Bolton. So the saga goes on. Yes. Well, check out today's episode of Pod Save America to hear even more analysis.

They also had an interview with Adam Schiff earlier this week. It's definitely worth a listen. That was the third installment of What to Impeach When You're Impeaching. I think we're getting close. We're figuring out what to impeach. Yeah.

Might not be that many installments left. Last night in Atlanta, Georgia, at Tyler Perry Studios, 10 Democratic presidential candidates took the stage to debate a wide variety of topics, ranging from foreign policy to paid family leave to, you guessed it, impeachment. Refreshingly, the whole shindig only lasted about two hours, which was welcome after two back-to-back days of House testimonies. Still, less time meant less sparring, shallower rebuttals, and somehow more time for commercial breaks? Inexplicably placed. Gideon, let's start with what the candidates had to say about the news of the day, impeachment. Yeah, so the first question went to Senator Elizabeth Warren, and it was directed to her as one of the senators in the race who would be the people that literally function as

the jury in an impeachment trial. So this was a layup for her because she's been in favor of impeachment since the Mueller report was released. Warren was asked if she would try to convince Republicans in the Senate to vote for impeachment. And she was like, yes, I would. What do you think? But what was notable about it was Warren took this pivot into talking about a plan she has to bar donors from being appointed to ambassador posts. And that's a direct reference to Sondland, who gave the Trump inaugural fund $1 million before he got his job. But I want to add one more part based on today's testimony. And that is how did Ambassador Sutherland get there? You know, this is not a man who had any

qualifications except one. He wrote a check for a million dollars. And that tells us about what's happening in Washington, the corruption, how money buys its way into Washington. Got to be connecting those dots. Early on in the debate as well, there was a question about people using the phrase lock him up about Trump in the way that there had been about Clinton. Yeah, I feel like that falls a little short in terms of the equivocation for me. For sure. You know, Trump obviously led that chant throughout the campaign cycle. There have been no Democratic candidates that have said anything like that so far. But former Vice President Joe Biden disagreed.

And he said that those chants were a bad idea and that he also would not compel his administration to investigate Trump if he is defeated in the next presidential election. OK, moving on. What else stood out to you that we were watching? OK, so obviously earlier this week we covered Mayor Pete's meteoric rise in Iowa. And we predicted that the candidates would go after him with the same veracity that they went after Elizabeth Warren when she became the frontrunner in Iowa right before the last debate. There were a few moments of tension against Buttigieg. But overall, this debate seems less contentious than the last few. Impeachment aside, Gideon, why do you think Pete just wasn't fair game last night?

I don't know. It's kind of a great question that I was working through most of the time when I was watching it. My initial sense is that maybe the candidates just think that he's a limited threat in Iowa for now. But at the same time, a lot of those candidates need to do well in Iowa also. I think maybe it's going to be a thing of, you know, if the trend continues, and it does seem like there is real upward momentum for him in Iowa and elsewhere, it might change. And I think the structure of the debate didn't always lend itself to those contrasts,

like we said. But things did open up a little bit in the second half. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there were a few moments that stood out to me. Tulsi and Pete, they sparred over Mexico and the statement he made that she sort of took out of context about troops in Mexico. And it was sort of out of nowhere. But that happened. Amy Klobuchar reiterated that a woman candidate with Pete's exact same experience wouldn't be on that stage at all. Cory Booker went after Pete's wunderkind reputation by reminding the audience that he, too, was a Rhodes Scholar and he was also a mayor of a city, a much bigger city than South Bend. I think that the biggest moment was probably between Senator Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete, where she took him to task about the stock image of a woman from Kenya that made its way onto some of his campaign materials that were directed at African-Americans. And like it was about Frederick Douglass.

It was just like it didn't go well last week. And yeah, she also brought up his poor polling with black voters. The larger issue is that for too long, I think candidates have taken for granted constituencies that have been the backbone of the Democratic Party and have overlooked those constituencies and have, you know, they show up when it's, you know, close to election time and show up in a black church and want to get the vote, but just haven't been there before. I mean, you know, there are plenty of people who applauded black women for the success of the 2018 election, applauded black women for the election of a senator from Alabama. But, you know, at some point, folks get tired of just saying, oh, you know, thank me for showing up and say, well, show up for me.

Yeah, that was powerful. And Mayor Pete's response has definitely gotten mixed reviews. I welcome the challenge of connecting with black voters in America who don't yet know me. And before I share what's in my plans, let me talk about what's in my heart and why this is so important. As mayor of a city that is racially diverse and largely low income, for eight years, I have lived and breathed

the successes and struggles of a community where far too many people live with the consequences of racial inequity that has built up over centuries, but been compounded by policies, policies and decisions from within living memory. Yeah. So by the end, it was, you know, definitely on the right track. But I got to say the challenge he was looking forward to kind of sounded like, you know, every black voter that's not interested in me, I see him as an opportunity to become friends. It's like, that's not what that is. But Gideon, do you think Pete's performance is going to move

the needle very much in either direction? I would be a little surprised if it did, to be honest with you. I don't think that any of the frontrunners really got all that scade throughout this debate. And most of the contentious back and forths seemed like they were coming out of nowhere. Like Biden against Tom Steyer. Like, I don't know what was going on in terms of the prep that he did or did not do for the debate, but to litigate Tom Steyer's record when there are other people that might be more important to you, I thought was a little bit strange. Yeah.

I mean, I think when we look back at the debates overall, if it's even possible to remember any of the big moments from previous ones, it didn't feel like there was an equivalent thing like that this time. Like nothing that would knock anybody off, you know, where they're currently at. Yeah. I mean, you know, sort of just going back to Pete, I think that, you know, overall, he did fine. And like you said, no one really got scathed in the debate. But, you know, and I think it could have gone a lot worse. No one brought up the high hope stance, which we're all still reeling from. Still, I think it's important to reiterate that like his lack of traction with

black voters, especially in Atlanta at Tyler Perry Studios, it was super apparent. And it seems like it's going to continue to be an issue in coming months, because even if he gains momentum, you know, outside of Iowa and elsewhere, you really can't win the presidency as a Democrat without the support of black votes. Right. All right. Well, one more moment. It was one of our faves from the night in that it was just so unexpected. Yeah, it took about 95 minutes of the whole thing. But Booker decided to show up and he addressed former Vice President Joe Biden. Crack some dad jokes in there, too. Here's the clip. I have a lot of respect for the vice president. He has swore me into my office as a hero. This week, I hear him literally say that I don't think we should legalize marijuana.

I thought you might have been high when you said it. And let me tell you, because marijuana in our country is already legal for privileged people. And the war on drugs has been a war on black and brown people. The clip is also really good. The visual clip, I should say. So seeing Biden's facial reactions. It was a big facial reaction. It's going to be a reaction gif immediately. It probably already is.

Yeah, I assume so. We should say, though, that Biden does want to decriminalize marijuana. Where he differs from the other candidates in the race is in legalizing the purchasing and selling of weed. Because he still wants to do more research on weed's long-term effects, I think is what he said. Yeah. Well, you know, so he's going to be 80 soon. So maybe he'll be done with his research from his lifetime. You know, that was a joke about smoking weed your whole life. I don't know his life. Eight decades of it. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Also, there were a few more moments that I thought were important. Elizabeth Warren reminded the audience

about the camps at the border, which I think is something that, you know, we shouldn't stop doing. It's not something that happened once and we can forget about it. It is still happening every day. And I thought it was just great that you brought it up. Yeah, yeah. One other one that kind of stuck out to me, I think just because of the response I got in the room, Senator Sanders brought up Palestinian rights in this sort of long answer that he had on foreign policy. I thought that was kind of interesting as well. OK, so when we look at this and the dust settles and everything, like where where does this leave us? What are we thinking?

Yeah, so I would say the things that may be changed at the end of the debate. Booker had a very impassioned plea for donors, you know, people to sort of come out for him. And he his campaign announced that they had made two200,000 in the half hour after the debate. So it seems like there's a little momentum there. He had a really good night. Also, you know, Julian Castro was notably not at the debate, but he was in Atlanta and he was also taking questions throughout the debate. And his team said that they had their biggest fundraising day of the month so far because of it. So it definitely seems like, you know, it seems a little unlikely that either of them will make it to the December debate, unfortunately, but it doesn't seem like they're

down and out yet. And, you know, only time will tell what if anything else has really shifted based on what we heard last night. I guess we'll just have to see. Yeah, we got time. We got to eat some food before the next one. Yeah, that's right. See, Thanksgiving's coming up. Yeah. Now, if you like what you've heard here

and you'd like to learn more about my plans, go ahead and text GideonRocks to 5555. Cool. And if you're interested in starting a revolution that's mostly reaction gifts. Visit my website, twitter.com slash Akilah. Obviously that was our final remarks.

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off subscriptions and free shipping. I'm going to go turn into LeBron James. Get jacked. And now back to the show. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. He was giving water and food to migrants, making the dangerous trek across the border. His arrest made national headlines early last year as it represented the uptick in prosecution and hostility toward humanitarian aid at the border. Other border activists and aid organizations see this new verdict as a major win. Prince Andrew will be stepping down from his public duties after a disastrous BBC interview failed to clear up his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Looks like His Royal Highness Duke of York is now His Royal Lowness Duke of Nothing.

When asked if he regretted his friendship with Epstein, the prince said Epstein's behavior was, quote, unbecoming. Come on, man. That's, I can't even. Prince Andrew has denied allegations that he participated in sexual misconduct in connection with Epstein. Google hired an anti-union consulting firm to clamp down on growing unrest within its workforce. It's the latest evidence of beef between the company and its employees, who've been organizing walkouts and protests against company policies since 2018. Though there aren't any formal unions at Google yet, workers have already been feeling the beginnings of a crackdown, like limits on topics and internal chat rooms and a browser extension that flags

calendar events with over 100 people. We wrote this headline in a Google Doc, but we did it with our fists clenched in solidarity with our comrades. If you felt bad watching Mark Zuckerberg get ripped apart by AOC during his last visit to Washington, don't worry, because he spent the same trip being put back together by Donald Trump. Zuck and Trump apparently had dinner at the White House with Facebook board member slash Trump mega donor Peter Thiel in a meeting that went undisclosed until NBC News reporters revealed it on Wednesday. It's not known what the men discussed, but if I had to guess, it's probably something about how spreading lies online is just OK and good. This was the second meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in a month.

Third time is the charm, Zuck. The foremost authority on music they play in Walgreens, the Grammy Awards, announced their 2020 nominees yesterday. And it was a mixed bag. The Highs, Lizzo, led the pack with eight nominations. And Billie Eilish became the youngest person to be nominated in all four top categories. Best New Artist, Record, Album, and Song of the Year. Now to the bad. K-pop supergroup BTS got completely shut out despite a huge worldwide fan base

and two albums hitting number one on the Billboard 100. It's maybe the most embarrassing thing to come out of the Grammys since country legend Jackson Maine pissed himself up there. R.I.P. Jackson Maine. We love you,ie. Oh, my, my, my. All right. Well, Mercury is no longer in retrograde. So if your computer stops working, it's not because the planets are mad at you. It's because you used Pirate Bay to download not safe for work wild thorn berries cartoons. And your hard drive is wet slime now. So sorry to you. And those are the headlines. That's all for today.

We're new, so if you like the show, make sure you subscribe, give us a rating, leave a review, contribute to my Rebuy the Mangos fund, and tell your friends to listen. By the way, if you're into reading and not just your big sister's diary like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash newsletters.

I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And that's how you execute a quid pro quo. What A Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.