Following the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing on Wednesday, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju asked Rep. Doug Collins (F-GA) a simple question about President Donald Trump's account of the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and Collins responded with a muddled non-answer.
"You keep saying that the president was concerned about corruption, but in neither of those phone calls did he mention the word 'corruption,'" said Raju. "Why didn't the president mention the word 'corruption,' and instead ask the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens?"
"Well, that's almost like saying, why don't you ask — frame your questions differently," said Collins. "He said this is what he wanted looked into, he said, can you guys, he said, help us as a country because we're trying to heal. We've had, it's, it's, Mr. Jordan said earlier, and did a great job, we had just come off the Mueller hearing which was, most all of you covered and found to be a total disaster for the impeachment narrative that Democrats have been saying. What we're simply saying here is, is that the issue was what happened on that call, and then it became all these stories from the whistleblowers about all these things that supposedly happened. And since then, fact witnesses and even hearsay evidence has said no, that's not what happened. So my question — I go back to something, and everyone, if Mr. Nadler stands here, asking this question, he said it almost twenty years ago, that we should never accept a report from another entity and just accept it and rubber-stamp it. I have a question for Mr. Nadler, is he just simply going to rubber-stamp this to get to the two things I said, the clock and the calendar."
Watch below:
.@mkraju: You keep saying POTUS was concerned about corruption. If that's true, why didn't he bring it up once duri… https://t.co/CqpTVOFXqA— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1575505143.0
