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On Tuesday, a CNN analyst said that she felt the testimony from Kurt Volker sounded more like "a character witness for Joe Biden," despite the GOP hoping he'd exonerate the president.
During Tuesday's broadcast of The Situation Room, CNN analyst Gloria Borger said that ex-Ukrainian envoy and ambassador Kurt Volker's congressional testimony—which the GOP allegedly hoped would help exonerate the president as Volker previously stated he felt that Rudy Giuliani's influence on foreign policy wasn't an offense—resulted in him defending Joe Biden instead.
In his testimony, Volker said he didn't believe that Biden had done anything improper, and that he didn't believe that Biden had anything to do with his son Hunter's dealings with a Ukrainian gas company. Volker also said that he didn't believe Hunter requested for the investigation into the company be dropped.
"I have learned many things that I did not know at the time of the events in question," Volker told the House Intelligence Committee in his prepared remarks on Tuesday.
"At no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden," Volker said. "I did not know that President Trump or others had raised Vice President Biden with the Ukrainians, or had conflated the investigation of possible Ukrainian corruption, with investigation of the former Vice President. In retrospect, for the Ukrainians, it clearly would have been confusing."
"In hindsight, I now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, Burisma, as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Biden," Volker added. "I saw them as very different—the former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable."
He added, "The Ukrainians believed that if they could get their own narrative across in a way that convinced Mayor Giuliani that they were serious about fighting corruption and advancing reform, Mayor Giuliani would convey that assessment to President Trump, thus correcting the previous, negative narrative. That made sense to me and I tried to be helpful."
Borger said that this morning's testimony indicated that Volker thought the President's Ukrainian phone call was "not in the national interest."
"As for Rudy Giuliani, it was clear from listening to Mr. Volker, who dealt with Rudy Giuliani quite frequently, that Volker said a couple of things," said Borger. "One is, he sounded like a character witness for Joe Biden. That he told—that he told Giuliani, you're barking up the wrong tree here with these conspiracy theories."
