Good evening both today and over the weekend, the President of the United States admitted

to talking to a foreign leader about investigating the president's leading domestic political

rival.

And today he suggested he was using $250 million in military aid as leverage.

That's where we begin tonight.

And it's important not to let what President Trump said, what he himself has already admitted,

get lost in all the noise surrounding this story, that noise, the goalposts moving the

denying of wrongdoing, even while seemingly admitting to it all.

There are all from a playbook this President has used before, and you'll see plenty of

examples of it tonight.

But strip that away, you don't go down those rabbit holes, and you're left with the

question of whether a sitting U.S. President may have used the power of his elective office

to obtain something of personal or political value from a foreign government, perhaps by

means of extortion.

And again, wherever a court or a congress may come down on that, the President himself

has now admitted to some elements of it, saying yes, he did talk with Ukraine's President

about criminally investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption

taking place, was largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President

Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.

The President's surrogates are trying to claim that whatever the President may have said,

his concern was corruption in Ukraine as he was just talking about there.

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