damning impeachment testimony. >> did you feel threatened? >> i did. >> it was littilllogical. >> once again their lies will be exposed just like the last times. >> the president has admitted to and says it's perfect. i say it's perfectly wrong. it's bribery. >> and a big change in iowa. mayor pete buttigieg is now running first in the state that votes first. >> well, that's extremely

encouraging. at the same time, there's a long way to go. >> "inside politics," the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters now. welcome to "inside politics." i'm john king. to our viewers in the united states and around the world, thank you for sharing your sunday. in a bit, some very big campaign news. a new democrat leads the pack in iowa, which kicks off the 2020 voting in just 11 weeks. but first, the impeachment hearings. there was eye-popping testimony in the week just ended and the process expect for more consequential witnesses and revelations in the week ahead. the trump political donor, turned ambassador to the european union will be a witness, and gordon sondland told congress under oath and under penalty of perjury, quote, i recall no discussions with any state department or white house official about former vice president or his son, nor do i recall taking part in any effort to encourage an investigation

into the bidens. that is ambassador sondland. but a senior u.s. diplomat now says he was with sondland in ukraine when he called president trump, told him he had just met with a new government in kiev and that it had agreed to launch the investigations the president had requested. that diplomat, david holmes, testified ambassador sondland held the phone away from his ear at a public restaurant and he clearly heard the president asking about investigations. after the call, holmes said ambassador sondland told him when it comes to ukraine, president trump cares only about, quote, big stuff that benefits the ft like the biden investigation mr. giuliani was pushing. so ambassador sondland has some explaining to do in the week ahead. mr. giuliani had a starring role in the week just ended. he illustrated a smear campaign that cost ambassador marie yovanovitch her job. yovanovitch told congress the u.s. embassy team was alarmed to see rudy giuliani pop up in ukraine working with the corrupt

forces she and her team had worked for years to push to the sideline. more alarming was when she received a 1:00 a.m. call from the state department telling her she was being removed, to get on the next plane home. in her words, she was knee-capped. and u.s. policy in ukraine, again her words, hijacked. >> although then and now, i have always understood that i served at the pleasure of the president. i still find it difficult to comprehend that foreign and private interests were able to undermine u.s. interests in this way. our ukraine policy has been thrown into disarray and shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an american ambassador who does not give them what they want. >> with us this sunday to share insights, cnn's malika henderson, carl of the "washington post" and julie davis of "the new york times."

the ambassador was compelling. she connects it to giuliani. there are other witnesses who will connect giuliani to the to the president. republicans said why is she here to the democrats, she is the beginning of what they say is the corrupt abuse of power. get her out of the day and do what you want to do. >> she's also the first human victim of what they say trump was doing and trying to leverage ukraine and then the aid and the white house, et cetera, to be able to get these politically advantageous investigations and yovanovitch was the first person that people believe it was a smear campaign that pushed her out of office. and if you were watching, you saw a person who spoke clearly, clearly was feelings about it. if you're republicans, you were brushing her off for that reason. but if you're looking to convince the public, you can have a very lawyerly argument and that is very important. it also matters to have people that can make you feel something

about this. and politics is about feelings more than it is about a ledger. and so that is what her role was in this, and i think that democrats thought that she did really well. she got a standing ovation from the lay people. >> and donald trump himself clearly felt something while he was watching that, tweeting, essentially smearing her even more during the testimony. something that adam schiff brought to the attention of the witness there. she said she was intimidated by the president smearing her and smearing her record of 30 years serving this country abroad. so i also thought, you know, people watched wednesday and bill taylor was a great witness, but it was very detailed. it was sort of a timeline of what he saw. and she was painting this in broad strokes, this idea that she was one of the good ones. she was fighting corruption in ukraine and all of a sudden she had these folks that were on the other side, including donald trump, who were pushing to get her out of there. somebody who was a champion of anti-corruption efforts, the

president wants to say that he was fighting corruption. why was he fighting against the person who was actually fighting corruption on the ground there. >> you mentioned the president's tweet. the president did not do anything about ambassador kent and taylor were testifying. his tweets were the normal witch hunt. but he directly went after ambassador yovanovitch when she was testifying, which blew up the republican strategy. their strategy was we're going to pretend there's no there there and go into the weekend and the american people lose interest and stopwatching. the president ginned this up. the republicans had to back off. listen to two republican voices, an independent counsel who knows something about impeachment and a former chairman of the house intelligence committee who is a republican saying, mr. president, bad play. >> extraordinarily poor judgment. the president frequently says i follow my instincts. sometimes we have to control our instincts. so obviously this was i think al

qaeda injurious. >> he is not helping himself. and the only time he's not shooting himself in the foot is when he's reloading the gun. he has just made an art of screwing up any messaging for the republicans to put together. >> republicans were not happy. >> no, and for one -- for a lot of reasons, but you mentioned before that their whole play here was to show that she's tan general, there's no there there. i think devin nunes called it an employment disagreement. this was part of the president actually bullying his own ambassador in real-time and they didn't really have to do much to prove that because he actually did it again during the hearing. so that just sort of dispensed with what their argument was going to be and showed people really the confrontation that occurred here, that nobody had really known about. she's talking about it, he's tweeting about it in real-time. the other thing that she did in addition to putting a human face, is she was quite articulate and concise in the

way this geo-politically hurt the united states. she talked about how this played right into putin's hands, showed the world that it's easy to just shove aside an american diplomat who you disagree with. those are all things that hurt the united states, not just hurt her personally. and the president's reaction here i think underscored that. >> and part of the republican argument was you never spoke to the president. they're trying to distance the president from anything. if giuliani or ambassador sondland did bad things, the president wasn't involved. the witnesses this week, you get first in the hearing here jennifer williams, alexander vindman, kurt volker, tim morris son, people whose names aren't known at home. but the president's envoy, volker, williamson and then you get to ambassador sondland later in the week. he is key here. but some of the building blocks to sondland laid by williams and morrison, their transcripts of their private testimony were at least over the weekend. this from mr. morrison, he

described ambassador sondland as a problem. he said irregular diplomat process was chiefly led by sondland. he said he was not comfortable with any idea of the new ukrainian president getting involved in politics and did not believe the call was illegal but was worried that it would leak because president would see the president asking for help with the bidens. jennifer williams thought the july 25th call was unusual and inappropriate. she confirmed that burisma, the gas company, was discussed on the call, but it was omitted from the transcript the white house released. and she said that bolton of course was involved with the vice president. but the idea that sondland gets this to the president. and morrison, a deputy working in the west wing, says they viewed sondland was a problem. there's a lot of pressure building on sondland and what his testimony is going to be and how he's going to present. and to tie some of this together, yovanovitch, trump's own administration knew that she was a sympathetic character for

the better part of a year. they tried to slow walk his demand to fire her several times until he got frustrated enough where they couldn't protect her anymore. we saw that on friday, what a compelling witness she is. you have bill taylor, you talk about alex vindman, these are career officials, career diplomats who have taken hardship posts, who are recipients of purple hearts and bronze stars. the very definition of compelling witnesses. now giving trump side has been gordon sondland, who we've already had questions come up about his testimony behind closed doors already. and you look at his background. he raised mouny for a democratic governor in org gon and he raised money for romney and got a spot on the transition committee, he raised money for trump and got a post to eu ambassador. he's the definition of the swamp that trump swore he would drain.

>> and sondland key to linking the president to this. this is from tim morrison's testimony and he'll testify publicly in the week ahead, and sondland understood his responsibilities to be doing what the president asked him to do. morrison, he related to me he was acting and discussing these matters with the president. and in fact, every time you went to check to see whether he had in fact talked to the president, you found that he had talked to the president. yes, mr. chairman. so there you have not a never trumper and a west wing employee on the national security council saying they were worried about sondland. he kept saying he was acting on the president's behalf. tim morrison said he checked and yes, he had spoken to the president. so that is the big pressure on sondland as we get to the week ahead. the impeachment hearing stunts. as we go to break, the democratic chairman went home to california saturday. his politics, no secret. >> we are more than a resistance now. we are a majority. we are a majority in one house and we will become the majority in the other, and we will send

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a key piece of that is to accuse the democrats of stacking the deck. >> thank you, mr. nunes. ambassador yovanovitch, thank you for being here today. >> the gentle woman will suspend. you're not recognized. >> i just recognized -- >> under house res 660 you're not allowed to yield time. >> the ranking member yielded time to another member of congress. this is the fifth time you have interrupted members of congress, duly elected members of congress. >> that was a stunt, stunt, stunt, clearly against the hearing rules passed by the full house. but it was a hit with the trump friendly media. here the republican council makes what seems to be a very important point. if the president wanted to do improper things in ukraine, why did the state department replace yovanovitch with veteran diplomat bill taylor.

>> is ambassador taylor the type of person that would facilitate those objectives? >> no. >> so ambassador taylor is a man of high integrity. >> absolutely. >> and he's a good pick for the post? >> he is. >> it took a while, a couple of hours, in fact, but the house democrats eventually countered. during the month between yovanovitch leaving and taylor getting to ukraine, the president's so-called three amigos stepped in for several meetings with the you ukraine government. >> the one month gap between the time you left and when ambassador taylor arrived provided the perfect opportunity for another group of people to basically take over ukraine policy, isn't that right? >> yeah. >> that part is fascinating to watch, in that there's a dispute over some facts, there's the stunt at the beginning which is the attempt to keep politics in line. but watching the give and take, essentially seeing who are the most nimble -- not all of them

are lawyers, but who are the most nimble lawyers in the hearing. >> and democrats do have a lot of lawyers on their side. the thing is that you have to be able to take your brain out and turn it 90 degrees. the facts are not that much in dispute. there are elements that the gop has not accepted because they are from closed door testimonies that haven't been accepted. but the main dispute is what is the intent who who was really driving the intent, was it trump but people who were working for him and were they communicating the president's actual message, and was this nefarious or was it just in the course of trying to fight corruption in ukraine. that means that you have to take the same things and make a case. so it requires fast thinking when someone lands a good punch from the other side. and that's the dispute that's at play here. >> the republican argument on friday, ambassador yovanovitch was compelling, she's a mentor to women and men in the foreign

service. she's making the case we finally start to push corruption to the side and up pops rudy giuliani. republicans are saying you serve at the pleasure of the president, a new government is coming in. the democratic chairman said, oh, no. >> the beginning of the story is an effort to get you out of the way. giuliani has made it abundantly clear he was in ukraine on a mission for his client, for the president to investigate the bidens. and you were viewed as an obstacle that had to go. not just by giuliani, but by the president of the united states. there is no camouflaging that corrupt intent. >> zero indication on the table today that any house republicans are moving. we'll watch them. my question is a week from now -- we don't know today and these things take a while to settle in. as the american people watch this, who carries the day and do the numbers move in america?

>> it's unclear. democrats made some headway in terms of changing the numbers in the lead-up to this as they were doing closed door depositions and the transcripts leaking. so they got it to 50/50, a little under water in some of the swing states. but it's a process. bill taylor started off and a lot of people maybe thought that wasn't compelling tv, yovanovitch much better. and then i think theks week you're going to have folks who talk to the president who were leery of giuliani's role in this. i think it's clear that people are tuning in and it's also clear that republicans have some weaknesses in terms of a fact pattern and arguing whatever case they're trying to make. the lawyer isn't as strong, for instance, as the democratic lawyer. i think nunes himself not a lawyer, adam schiff is obvious a harvard trained lawyer and former prosecutor. so they've got some weaknesses in their case and we're relying on talking points and stunts. >> one of their talking points,

you can believe it at home or accept it, is that maybe all these nefarious things happened and maybe the president shouldn't have asked for the investigation or withheld the aid, but they eventually got the aid. they never announced the investigation. so where's the big deal? >> what did president zelensky actually do to get the aid? the answer is nothing. he didn't do any of the things that house democrats say that he was being forced and coerced and threatened to do. >> some have argued in the president's defense that the aid was ultimately released, and that is true. but only after congress began an investigation. >> again, more of the sparring and the democratic point being, attempted extortion, bribery, whatever you want to call it, is a crime. >> i think mee ia is right, thes all these pieces that democrats are putting in place that show you it's not illegal for the president to withdraw his ambassador or to call back his

ambassador. that's fully within a president's rights. but if the reason that he did it was to get down the road to making this inappropriate sort of conditionality with the aid and with the white house meeting and the investigations that he wanted, they are going to argue that's bad enough. republicans need to push back. and what we see them doing is giving people, giving voters, the public something to hang their hats on if they want to ex cues this conduct. the aid did eventually flow and the president does have the right to recall an ambassador. i think the issue for democrats is how are they going to move the needle on any of this. because trump's base is so convinced that he did nothing wrong. a lot of other voters in the middle kind of don't know. it's so confuseding and there are so many complexities here. they have to simplify this and boil it down. i think that's why we hear them using words like likery and coercion, to sort of signal to people that it's not that complicated. this is a simple matter of right

and wrong. >> the president may have hurt himself by ginning up interest in the hearings. we'll come back with a 2020 campaign twist. iowa democrats have a new favorite. >> announcer: watch the live reveal of the all-electric ford mustang mach-e tonight. those are the ones that show up and change everything.

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a dramatic new campaign change today as the democrats prepare for a big debate this week. pete buttigieg is now the leader in iowa, which gets the 2020 voting under way in just 11 weeks. let's take a look at the new numbers. our cnn des moines register pool. mayor buttigieg on top with 25%. elizabeth warren at 16%, joe biden 15%, bernie sanders 15%. mayor buttigieg on top. look at the change since september. plus 16 for mayor buttigieg. elizabeth warren drops 6 to 16. the vice president, former vice president dropped a little bit. bernie sanders actually came up a little bit.

amy klobuchar doubling from 3 to 6. but 16 points from accept until now, a big surge for mayor buttigieg. why is this happening? a more moderate electorate in the iowa caucuses. 63% say candidates' views are about right, 63% of likely caucus goers say that about pete buttigieg. this is an interesting dynamic to keep watching. senator warren has been under attack. the attacks are having an impact. in march, 23% of likely caucus goers said senator warren was too liberal. 38% say that now. senator warren slipping a bit in part because even iowa democrats thinking maybe she's a little too liberal. that is a problem for her after all these attacks. if you ask iowa democrats what's most important, they still want to beat president trump.

that's why there's good news for vice president biden. mayor buttigieg comes in second, tied to senator warren and sanders. mayor buttigieg was a boost right now. he was in california over the weekend and he knows a majority in some states, 60% of the democratic primary voters will be women. listen here. >> women are the backbone of every important social change in this country and i have committed to ensuring that the cabinet of the united states when i am your president will be at least 50% women, because then it will make better decisions for the american people. >> it's a good day for mayor pete. sometimes the campaign is getting drowned out by the impeachment debate. iowa votes in 11 weeks. >> this is good news for mayor pete buttigieg. i think a lot of the campaign saw this coming. i talked to a bunch of the campaigns weeks ago and it was like who has the momentum in iowa, and it was clear that it was pete and this shows it. and i think it also shows that

the attacks that have been launched by mayor pete buttigieg and by joe biden and bernie sanders on elizabeth warren are working. you see her slide in iowa and the concern may be in the general election she wouldn't be as competitive as some of the other folks. if you're pete this is good news, but there are some red flags going forward. this is a state that's largely white. can he compet in states that are more diverse, bigger states. that's still an achilles heel. he isn't connecting with the base. >> and when he gets attention for leading in a poll like this, that's a giant question to go forward. as the democrats have a debate, how far left do we want to go, somebody in the middle? the voice of obama, which has been largely missing from the primaries is back. the president over the weekend doing a big event with democratic donors and saying this. >> even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision,

we also have to be rooted in reality. this is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement. they like seeing things improve, but every american doesn't think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. >> pretty easy to read that as a shot at warren and sanders, that they're proposing too much, too fast and you can't sell it. >> i think this is the big dispute within the democratic party is that the base that is more left leaning wants to tear things down because they don't see the step-wise small motions that happen as having fixed systems enough to actually improve economic prospects and improve health care enough that it's actually improving everybody's lively lohood right now. sthas the dispute within the

democratic party and he's speaking for a portion of the party that's more moderate and doesn't know how you'll even pay for it if you decide to do all the changes. and the two big questions, one, where is the middle for the democrats. and also, is obama still right? obama was president years ago at this point. what followed him as trump-ism. trump-ism is not moving toward the center. trump-ism is moving the opposite of that and does that mean the democrats should go in the same direction or still try to hold the center? would obama be obama today the way he was before? and nobody can answer that question and you don't know which lens to view these things. >> it's interesting, because he is a rare voice and he stays quiet and stays out of it. that is a distinct message and you've seen senator warren in the past week talk about the transition period or medicare for all. senator sanders saying just yesterday, no, some of these changes are 30 years over due.

so among the progressives, there's a much different reaction. >> and president obama's comments are so the good news, bad news for pete buttigieg. he's come off as a thoughtful, articulate voice in the party but he's 37 years old, a harvard grad, openly gay, things that you might put in the revolutionary bucket for a president. meanwhile, the race is not consolidating behind buttigieg. it's getting larger. we saw entries from patrick and bloomberg, and these are people who view themselves as moderate voices in the party. and sort of expressing concerns, same as obama, that we see much more inside the beltway than we do out in america right now. your poll, a lot of polls have shown enthusiasm for the current field pretty high. i mean, your poll showed 73% of people said they were enthusiastic about who their first or second choice was, up 5

points from september. that is not why bloomberg and patrick are getting in this race. >> they might see an opening to another road. we shall see. our sunday trail mix is next. the new comers hoping to shake up the democratic race even more. and i recently had hi, ia heart attack. it changed my life. but i'm a survivor. after my heart attack, my doctor prescribed brilinta. it's for people who have been hospitalized for a heart attack. brilinta is taken with a low-dose aspirin.

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hospital on saturday. the tweet says his physical was great. and the family also visited the family of another patient. presidential visits to the hospital usually scripted well in advance. a source tells cnn this one was unscheduled and now on our sunday campaign trail mix, cnn's christine ya told michael bloomberg is days away from a decision on whether to run for president. he requested a qualifying petition from pennsylvania. those are all super tuesday primaries. but the billionaire skipped new hampshire for the filing deadline, that was on friday. and room for one more? the former massachusetts governor patrick making a last-minute entry into the 2020 race as well this week. less than three months before the first votes to be cast. patrick did file in the new hampshire primary and his first campaign speech was yesterday in california. governor patrick's message there, don't put me on any one

i'd logical box and he says compromise is not a dirty word. >> i'm not talking about a moderate agenda. this is no time for a moderate agenda. i'm talking about being woke while leaving room for the still waking. we have to do better than the very politics that has brought america to this point. the politics that says we have to agree on everything before we can work together on anything. a difference of opinion is not disqualifying. >> up next, robert mueller's last act, a trial that exposes another trump lie and will land another trump insider in prison. great riches will find you when liberty mutual

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the final act of the mueller investigation collided with the impeachment inquiry on friday. long-time presidential friend roger stone was found guilty on

seven counts, including lying to congress and witness tampering. stone now the fifth trump insider headed to prison, a list that includes the president's long "time" lawyer, two campaign aids and his first national security adviser. candidate trump denied knowing anything about wikileaks dumps in advance. the testimony at the trial detailed that candidate trump was lying. wikileaks and clinton then, ukraine and biden, that's one way to look at it. >> this is the same behavior. this is dirty tricks, these are dirty tricks. it's a climate of corruption. it's trying to acquire dirt on your opponents. it's part of american politics, but we shouldn't be proud of it. but it has a different meaning and significance when it's done by a president. when the president is in office. there's a similarity between the climate around mr. stone and what he did for the then candidate and what we're looking at with mr. giuliani.

>> interesting take from one of our contributors, who was the director of the nixon library. that's an interesting take. but just the collision of mueller, another trump insider going to prison in the middle of the impeachment thing, and to tim's point, with dirty tricks getting evidence against your opponents, doing anything to dig up dirt on your opponents front and center. >> the timing was quite striking. this hearing is going on on capitol hill, you have marie yovanovitch sitting there testifying and down the block essentially you have roger stone being convicted of all these counts. and it does show you a pattern of behavior at the very least by the people who president trump sounds himself with. and if you believe the evidence in the stone trial, which seems like the judge and the jury did, that involves the president himself, and that he is totally fine with. and existed in a campaign realm before, but is now in the oval office because he's president.

so it is a pattern of behavior and you have to make a judgment whether this is directly parallel to this, that or just sort of the way that he works. but there's no denying those similarities. >> it's also a reminder of just how interwoven everything is. we tend to draw a line at the end of bob mueller's testimony and this is the ukraine chapter. you can't separate russia and ukraine or the actors. new characters come in and go out, but it's still the trump administration that's being focused on. and remember, there is nothing in those rules that govern the impeachment proceeding the tells the judiciary committee they only have to stick to ukraine. if we start rulings on don mcgahn and, remember, there's 53 transcripts of the russia probe we haven't seen yet. this could blowup in become much broader. but this can all be brought together still. >> and the your point, you have the graphic of the trump

insiders going to prison. rudy giuliani is under investigation by federal prosecutors in new york. not just under scrutiny by congress in the democrat-led impeachment inquiry. props who whoever runs joe biden's social media because joe biden doing this after the roger stone conviction, two elections, zero criminal convictions, trying to get a little play on that one. because if you think back, i said this during the break. imagine if this were the obama administration. now republicans, let's listen to some of the president's defenders. nothing. >> life on earth is bribery. you say i want something from you, you give something to me. that's how the world works everywhere. >> you elected donald trump to drain the swamp? well, dismissing people like yovanovitch is what it looks like. dismissing everybody involved from the obama holdover days trying to undermine trump. >> under obama, ambassadors were

coming back in body bags. now everyone is upset because one got fired. so what? >> decide at home whether you find that distasteful or not. our reporters share from their notebooks, including a 2019 setback just as the campaign looks west trying to improve the 2020 map. and...whatever this was. because we make our meat with the good of the deli and no artificial preservatives. make every sandwich count with oscar mayer deli fresh. get the perfectly grilled flavors of an outdoor grill indoors, and because it's a ninja foodi, it can do even more, like transform into an air fryer. the ninja foodi grill, the grill that sears, sizzles, and air fry crisps.

those are the ones that show up and change everything. >>

. one last time around the "inside politics" table. ask our reporters to share something out of their notebooks to help you. >> so over the next weeks, i'm looking at amy klobuchar. her team feels good about where they are in iowa the last poll. she's firmly in the top five. they feel like she's in the century's lane in iowa. think about your her last debate performances, she turn out a good debate performance. it will be interesting to see if she brings some of the fire she aimed at elizabeth warren in the last debate and pete buttigieg, the other people in the centrist lane. folks around her company said -- so that's interesting. so it will be interesting on the debate stranage to see if there is a centrist pile up in those folks going at each other. that's the lane she feels like she has a ways to go. particularly in iowa to make up

the gap from where she is now. >> getting drown out by impeachment, to some degree. >> yeah. but the campaign is at the moment. >> president trump's path to election remains the same in 2016. florida and the midwest. the campaign knows it needs back up plans. it started laying ground work in states he lost in 2016. he was campaigning more recently in new mexico, minnesota, add oregon to the list. the campaign manager and the campaign senior advisor on the president's daughter-in-law head to oregon. they'll meet with some representatives with the timber industry, hosting fundraisers, take outside ads in newspapers in eugene and portland as they test the waters for trump's 20 bid. we've been surprised by the president in more ways than one, but as of right now, a year out from the election, let's call it unlikely he makes up any ground in the pacific northwest.

he lost oregon by 11 and his approval rates was 16 points underwater worse than any other state he won in 2016. >> interesting to watch. 30 years ago, oregon was a swing state. 30 years ago. we'll see. who knows. things change. >> whatever is going on domestically the international focus on russia and ukraine. turkey is fading into the background a little bit. erdogan was at the white house this weekend. there was a meeting which he didn't win any friends. that's going to potentially set up a clash between republicans in congress and presidents. everybody is looking a at senate to see if they're move on turkey sanctions. yes, the republican in charge of the senate foreign relations committee is trying to find a work around. the more erdogan does not come to the middle on this, and the fewer friends he's winning over in the gop and congress. we'll be watching to see if they make a move. because this is the timing of

this couldn't be worse for the president to have the stakes of the conflict that he has with the gop over turkey/syria issues happen in the midst of this itch peoplement. it can make the gop lose the patience across the board. if they vote on sanctions, that's a signal they need to let some of the presentation out. >> great story. >> i have my eye on the calendar for the other event. impeachment and how problematic it's becoming and complicated for both democrats and republicans, actually. there was talk about having an impeachment vote in the house before christmas. i think that's still a hope among house democratic leaders. but theimpeachment is not over. we have the a witness depositived at the end of last week. david holmes may be called for a public session. we have eight witnesses coming up this week. one of whom gordon sondland may have to slip given the information they're hearing. the idea a vote before christmas

in the house seems more up in the air. you're looking at a potential senate trial up against, potentially, the iowa caucuses and new hampshire and a lot of crucial campaigning time for the democratic senators who are campaigning for president. so it's becoming a politically difficult and, frankly, logistically difficult calculation i think both sides of the capitol have not figured out yet. >> yikes. 2019 has been crowded. 2020 looks -- wow. >> i'll close with another red state set back for president trump. jon edwards won re-election of governor louisiana last night. until that final visit, the president referenced the impeachment fight here in washington. told louisiana voters, quote, "you need to send a message to the corrupt democrats in washington." well, the president did not get his wish. louisiana has a very unique brand of politics. governor edwards is a relatively popular incumbent.

don't overread the trump factor here. don't understate it either. the president asked the same of kentucky voters two weeks ago and the republican lost the governor's race there, too. the 2018 and 2019 elections were miserable for republicans. even in red states and especially in the american suburbs. 2020 is just around the corner. that's it for "inside politics." hope you can catch us weekdays at noon eastern. up next "state of the union" with jake tapper. it includes mike turner and chris murphy. thank you for sharing your sunday. have a great day! .

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it cleans row by row. if it's not a shark, it's just a robot. ♪ secure line? a u.s. official said he heard president trump push for ukraine investigations. again. >> nothing about the first time. >> as the man on the other end of the line prepares to testify publicly. what will he say about the president's orders? i'll speak to a republican on the house intelligence committee, congressman mike turner, next. and unforce the error? the president goes after a witness on twitter. while she was testifying about feeling under attack. >> it's very intimidating. >> democrats seize on the tweet as potentially illegal. >> we take this kind of witness intimidation and obstruction inquiry seriously. >> democratic senator chris murphy joins