Sen. Chris Murphy, while thinking Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan to be a "good guy," said Thursday he believes that it "strained credibility," when he testified that he didn't hear anything about hearing of a quid quo pro arrangement between President Donald Trump and Ukraine's president the July 25 phone call between the two presidents.
"Even after that he doesn't seem to have done much actual digging as to what the truth was because he was trying to testify yesterday that he still had no personal opinion as to whether this drug deal actually went down," the Connecticut Democrat told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I thought that was strained credibility, (and was) disappointing because I think Sullivan is a pretty upstanding public servant."
And, Murphy said, if such corruption was happening under Sullivan's watch by people that worked for him, "it's pretty unbelievable that he wasn't asking more questions."
Meanwhile, if Trump had sought a quid pro quo agreement, "it's absolutely impeachable if it looks what it appears to be. But it is also fundamentally corrupt for any presidential administration to be trying to get a foreign power to interfere in American politics, whether or not you're holding out aid in order to get that interference."
He pointed out that in May, Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani was "publicly crowing about his attempts to go to this new novice president in Ukraine and get him to do Trump's dirty work to destroy the Bidens," said Murphy. "I sent a letter in May to the Foreign Relations Committee telling them that this was fundamentally corrupt, this was unacceptable in a democracy."
However, almost everybody involved either tried to further the scandal or keep it quiet, said Murphy, and no matter how many people tell the story now, it's "pretty disappointing" that they didn't speak up until the whistleblower came forward.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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