New Revelations In Ukraine Probe; Impeachment Rules Debate; John Bolton Invited To Testify In Impeachment Inquiry; Two State Department Officials Testifying Today On Hill; July 10th White House Meeting With Ukraine Is First Report Of Possible Quid Pro Quo.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: Astead Herndon, thank you for writing about it. We'll continue this controversy as we watch the field. Thanks for being with me. I'm Brooke Baldwin. "</s>THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER": starts right now.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.</s>JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. And we indeed begin with breaking news. Two sources present at the Tuesday deposition of White House National Security Council staffer Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman tell me that Vindman told congressional investigators that he became convinced that President Trump personally was ordering the withholding of $400 million in aid for Ukraine as a way of forcing Ukrainian President Zelensky to publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens. Vindman said the existence of a quid pro quo had been clear to him by July 10. That's when U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, something of a point man on the Ukraine situation, told Ukrainian officials in a meeting at the White House that they would need to deliver -- quote -- "specific investigations" in order to secure the White House meeting they so desired with President Trump. Now, that is according to Vindman's opening statement that was reported yesterday. But the fact that the $400 million in aid, including that desperately needed military assistance to beat back the Russians, that was also being used by the president, that didn't become clear until the next month, Vindman testified yesterday, and after then National Security Adviser John Bolton told Vindman to prepare a decision memo by August 15 for Bolton and other senior administration officials to present as a Trump administration-wide interagency argument to President Trump to release the assistant funds to Ukraine as soon as possible. Vindman wrote that memo, wrote that argument. And a day later, Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and other national security officials met with President Trump at his resort in Bedminster. After they met in Bedminster, Vindman learned that President Trump was still refusing to allow those funds to go to Ukraine. And that convinced Lieutenant Colonel Vindman that President Trump was still waiting for the -- quote -- "deliverable," as Bill Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, referred to it in his deposition, the deliverable, the announcement of an investigation into the Bidens that Ukrainian officials needed to deliver in order to get the money they so desperately needed. Our team of reporters is on the story. And we have some even more breaking news right now. John Bolton has been officially asked to testify for the impeachment inquiry. Kaitlan Collins, tell us about that.</s>KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, he's been asked to testify next week, on November the 7th. House impeachment investigators have invited the former national security adviser, who has been famously silent as all of this has ramped up, so the issues surrounding, of course, this call, a call John Bolton was not on, but that his deputy instead was on, someone who is in kind of a bind of his own, deciding whether or not he's going to appear. So, right now, we don't know if John Bolton is going to appear. They have not issued a subpoena for him to appear yet. But, right now, that is an invitation that has been made. And the question is, is he going to take them up on it? And if he does, what does he say? That would be incredibly significant for all of this, because, of course, we have seen all of these people going and testifying on Capitol Hill. Not a lot of them have had interactions directly with President Trump. John Bolton, of course, is someone who was in the Oval Office almost every day. And while he and the president soured in their relationship at the end, he knows a lot, because he was at the center of this fight over this military aid with Mick Mulvaney. He's not the only one, though. There have been two other big invitations. That's for John Eisenberg, who is the lawyer for the National Security Council, who has also found himself in the middle of this, because he was someone who several staffers who had issues with the president's July phone call went and spoke with him about. He's also another person that he and the National Security Council legal team the White House has pinned to the blame on for moving that transcript of the president's call to that highly secure system.</s>TAPPER: Rough transcript.</s>COLLINS: Yes, rough transcript, not exact, as we have since learned from that testimony yesterday. And there's one more, Michael Ellis. That is his deputy there, who, of course, has come under the spotlight of his own at times because he used to work for the House Intelligence Committee when Nunes was in charge of it. He was facing accusations about letting the White House review classified information. So those are three big asks. We are waiting to see what it is they say.</s>TAPPER: Exactly. And Bolton has a lot to contribute. I suspect he's not going to testify unless he's subpoenaed. But let's talk about what Vindman said, because Vindman said yesterday in his deposition -- CNN has just broken this news -- that he became convinced that this aid, $400 million, much of it was military aid for Ukraine, that President Trump was withholding it until the Ukrainians publicly announced that the Bidens were going to be investigated. And a lot of this is wrapped up in this August memo. You have more reporting on that August memo, which was basically making the argument to President Trump, we need to release these funds.</s>SARA MURRAY, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, look, I think one of the issues here is that the administration has sort of said there were all these legitimate reasons for why the president was not releasing this money. And, as you are reporting -- and Kylie has done a lot of great reporting on this -- there actually was a push to get the president to sign on the dotted line and release the money in August. And it came from some of the top administration officials that, since then, the White House has pinged the blame on for holding back this money. So we have seen, as witness after witness goes before the impeachment investigators, this narrative that the White House and the Office of Management and Budget tried to create around this freeze has really begun to crumble. And it seems more and more like this decision to freeze the money and then to release the money rested solely on the whims of President Trump.</s>TAPPER: And, Kylie, you cover the State Department for us. You're reporting that the president's decision in June to freeze these funds unnerved a lot of senior administration officials.</s>KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Yes, so we're hearing today from one of the State Department officials who was involved in U.S.-Ukraine policy quite directly. She was one of the assistants to Kurt Volker. And she is telling lawmakers today, according to her prepared testimony, her opening remarks that we obtained, that she was on that July 18 interagency discussion in which the announcement was made that there was going to be this hold on this security assistance. And during that phone call, they said that it was at the direction of President Trump. This gets back to the heart of what Sara was just saying, is that OMB was announcing that there was the hold. We're told that it was OMB who was doing the review, that the Pentagon was also doing a review. But, ultimately, day one, they were told that it was President Trump who was directing the hold. And Catherine Croft is someone who knows Ukraine well. She knew that Rudy Giuliani was intimately involved in this smear campaign against Ambassador Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador there. So, U.S. State Department officials were very concerned when they first heard about this hold and really had questions about the legitimacy of it.</s>TAPPER: And, Sara, you have previously reported about six sources telling CNN that Republican Senator Rob Portman, a Republican of Ohio, made one last pitch to President Trump in this September 11 phone call, urging him to release these phones.</s>MURRAY: That's right. This is a point where basically everyone else in the administration is saying, OK, it's time to release this money. And the president still won't budge. Rob Portman decides he's going to take one more go at it. He calls the president and essentially says, if you don't get this money out the door, essentially now, it's going to go away, because the fiscal year is ending, and then you're going to have a potentially even bigger problem on your hands. And they hung up the call, and the president really surprised everyone around him, everyone in Washington and even everyone in Ukraine, because he decided after that call that he was going to release the money. Now, we don't know, ultimately, if Rob Portman's pitch was the one that put the president over the edge, or if it was this mounting pressure that he was getting from lawmakers and even within his own administration, but we do know that he released the money after that, and this is something impeachment investigators very much want the answer to.</s>TAPPER: It's also possible that the president -- correct me if I'm wrong, Kaitlan -- had heard about this whistle-blower, and the fact that he was -- he or she had lodged a complaint, was expressing concerns about this rogue Ukraine policy and the fact that military aid and other aid was being held up to force this investigation of the Bidens.</s>COLLINS: Yes.</s>TAPPER: We don't know when President Trump learned about this.</s>COLLINS: No, we don't know. There's still a lot of mystery surrounding the timeline exactly when it comes to that. But we do know that this person, before going and filing this complaint, went to an attorney beforehand and talked about this, talked about their concern, the concern that they had heard from people, before they went and filed this complaint. So there is a chance that the White House was more aware than we have initially believed. Whether the president was aware, that's really the question. But also this has really been something that has kind of consumed the president so far. He talks about it constantly all the time, wanting to know the identity of this whistle-blower, because he believes it's just someone who has essentially a bone to pick with him. And those are really his questions that have focused on the identity of the whistle-blower.</s>TAPPER: And let me just ask you, briefly, there is this huge campaign to smear Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who fought for the United States, is an American citizen, has shrapnel because he was -- still in his body because he was hit by an IED when he was in combat operations for the U.S. in Iraq, going after him as a dual citizen, going after him as like some sort of covert agent for Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. Is there -- is there anybody in the White House who's concerned, like, boy, this really looks bad? Even Liz Cheney is saying that this is shameful.</s>COLLINS: That was something everyone was paying attention to in the White House. We talked to several people about it yesterday, because it wasn't just Liz Cheney. She was the first. And a lot of people were surprised that she came out so forcefully about that, but also John Thune and Mitch McConnell later on talking about these criticisms of someone who was just simply, they believe, telling what happened in his position in that role. Of course, he is incredibly sensitive for the White House, because he is the first person to testify that was actually on that call. That's why you saw people trying to discredit him, even though he is someone who has served in the military, was wounded. And essentially people in the White House have said they didn't think that was a great idea.</s>TAPPER: My sources say that he reported to work today at the National Security Council, even after all of this. All right, thanks, one and all, for being here and reporting on all this. There's a ton going on today. Right now, another Foreign Service officer is testifying before House investigators, this as lawmakers are right now debating impeachment inquiry rules ahead of a full House vote tomorrow. Lots of debate about that. And then, on the other side of the country, winds more than 70 miles per hour fueling multiple fires across California. We're going to go live there as well. Stay with us.