Sen. Ron Johnson says 'most' of President Trump's advisers were trying to figure out 'some way' to get him to release a hold on roughly $400M in Ukrainian military aid, an effort at the center of Democrats' impeachment inquiry.
his Aug. 31 phone call with Trump, in which he asked the president whether aid was contingent on the announcement of investigations into the Democrats and the Bidens. Johnson said Trump strongly denied that allegation, though, in subsequent testimony, Trump's ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said he spoke with a top Ukrainian official one day after Johnson's phone call and said"the resumption of U.S.
"I'm the one that raised the issue from my phone call with Gordon Sondland the day before where he brought up some type of ... something that Ukraine had to do before President Trump would release the funding and when I brought up that scenario, President Trump immediately and I've described it as adamantly and vehemently denied it," Johnson said, adding he remains"sympathetic to President Trump's legitimate concerns about corruption.
As CNN's Jake Tapper noted, the only instances of"corruption" that Trump brought up in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnkiy, a call summary of which was released by the White House, were involving the debunked conspiracy and the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation.
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