In the wake of the explosive Tuesday testimony from career diplomat Bill Taylor, the White House continued to rail against House’s impeachment inquiry.
Although Vice President Mike Pence has yet to directly comment on Taylor’s bombshell 15-page written statement to Congress — which discussed texts, phone calls, and meetings laying out the quid pro quo that President Trump has repeatedly denied — he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in a Tuesday night segment that the ongoing testimonies by career diplomats as part of the impeachment inquiry only reinforce the Trump administration’s need to “drain the swamp.”
“There is no question when President Trump said we were going to drain the swamp, but an awful lot of the swamp has been caught up in the State Department bureaucracy and we’re just going to keep fighting it,” Pence said. “And we are going to fight it with the truth.”
Pence’s reaction echoed that of White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who said in a statement earlier Tuesday that Taylor’s testimony was a “coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution.”
When pressed by Ingraham on whether he was ever comfortable with Rudy Giuliani’s role in the Ukraine pressure campaign, Pence demurred, saying his own “involvement in Ukraine was all directly from my conversations with the President, and my conversations and meetings with President Zelensky.”
“We were supporting and encouraging Ukraine to deal with years of corruption and calling on European allies to do more to support the Ukraine people,” Pence said.
Watch Pence’s remarks below:
Pence: "An awful lot of the swamp has been caught up in the State Department bureaucracy" pic.twitter.com/GR1qRoNKIV
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 23, 2019
