Jake Tapper debunks GOP talking points about Ukrainian ambassador's 2016 op-ed on Crimea
Tapper: “Trump had just said he was thinking about, if he became president, allowing Crimea, which the Russians illegally seized from Ukraine, just considering that to be Russian territory going forward”
Published
Citation
From the November 15, 2019, CNN coverage of impeachment hearings
GLORIA BORGER (CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST): I think to me, the president threw a grenade into any Republican effort to try and discredit the ambassador in any way, shape, or form.
I think the Republicans had a couple goals here. One was to say you're irrelevant to this story, because as you yourself pointed out, you were not serving during the July 25th phone call, and so why are you even here? They wanted to talk about that a little bit and then they also wanted to make the president into a somewhat sympathetic figure -- there are people in Ukraine out to get him during the election. Don't you think that he has a real reason to be a little paranoid about what the Ukrainians were trying to do and you, ambassador did nothing about that. You didn't try and defend the president against people in Ukraine who were on Hillary Clinton's side in this election. Those are two points they wanted to make.
JAKE TAPPER (CNN ANCHOR): Can I just interrupt for one second and come back to you, because during one of the breaks I looked at one of the op-eds, that congressman Jordan was citing as evidence of the Ukrainians trying to interfere in our election. And what it actually was, was the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States noting that candidate Trump had just said he was thinking about, if he became president, allowing Crimea, which the Russians illegally seized from Ukraine, just considering that to be Russian territory going forward.
BORGER: Right.
TAPPER: That would be -- and the Ukrainian ambassador understandably wrote an op-ed saying that he thought that would not be a good idea. So it was not Ukrainian interference in the election the way that the Russians interfered in our election. It was somebody saying we shouldn't hand over our territory to Russia, that would be appeasement.
BORGER: And these are Republicans by the way defending that? The world is upside-down. Right?
TAPPER: Because the only allegiance is to President Trump in some peoples' minds.
BORGER: Right, so the world is upside-down, because these are Republicans saying, okay, it's okay to say we're going to give back Crimea. Right? To the Russians? So, and then the president drops this grenade into the middle of the hearing and suddenly they have to pay homage to the ambassador, because they couldn't believe what they heard from the president. And Adam Schiff I think was very smart to read this tweet to her. She was clearly shocked and offended by it and I thought she handled it with a great amount of dignity.