After a series of false starts on impeachment proceedings, House Democrats finally offered Americans a hearing on Thursday that yielded some pretty simple takeaways that help the case for further investigation into what was an obvious cover-up by the Trump administration.
Although the acting director of national intelligence wasn't an entirely cooperative witness, his appearance before the House Intelligence Committee was plagued by very little of the hostility and total reticence demonstrated by former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and special counsel Robert Mueller.
While Republicans' defense of Donald Trump's actions during the hearing boiled down almost entirely to process arguments, Democrats managed to score some damning exchanges and affirmative statements from acting DNI Joseph Maguire. Here are three big initial takeaways.
1) Acting DNI Maguire took the whistleblower complaint directly to the subject of the complaint, Donald Trump's White House, for advice on how to proceed with the complaint.
House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff got Maguire to clarify whether he sought guidance from the White House first on what to do with the complaint. "The first place you went was to the White House," Schiff said. "Do I understand that from your opening statement? The first place you went for a second opinion was to the White House?"
"I did not go for a second opinion. The question was, is the formation contained here subject to executive privilege," Maguire responded, "We went to the White House first."
“So you went to the subject of the complaint for advice first about whether you should provide the complaint to Congress," Schiff said in summation.
This is a very easily comprehensible concept. You simply do not got to the subject of a complaint for an objective opinion about how to move forward with that complaint.
2) Maguire said several times that the whistleblower acted in good faith and adhered to the law in making the complaint.
Acting DNI Maguire stated, “I think the whistleblower did the right thing. I think he followed the law every step of the way.”
This entirely refutes Trump’s maligning of the whistleblower as an unpatriotic partisan with an axe to grind.
3) Maguire was clear that he considers election security to be a primary concern for him as director of national intelligence.
Acting DNI Maguire: "Election security is my most fundamental priority."
Enough said. Maguire's assertion completely destroys the logic behind the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel opinion reasoning that the DNI shouldn't relay the complaint to Congress because election security didn't fall within his purview. That's slightly in the weeds, but the bottom line is that the more Democrats can destroy the reasoning behind that OLC opinion, the more obvious it is revealed to be a partisan hack job by Attorney General William Barr's Department of Justice.
In some ways, this hearing didn't reveal a whole lot of new information, but that was because both the notes of the phone call and the whistleblower complaint were publicly released in the preceding hours. It's important to remember that Chairman Schiff scheduled the hearing as a way to pressure acting DNI Maguire into forwarding the complaint to Congress. It worked.