This week has been pretty overwhelming. But then, last week was at the very least … whelming. Anyway, if you missed any of what was happening in the last two weeks, I cobbled together an Abbreviated Summary of the Public Hearings on Friday in which I tried my hand at touching on some key elements of testimony from each of the witnesses.
No sooner did I finish, than I realized it was utterly inadequate. Not only could I not capture the important points of each witness without loading on pages of information, even if I wrote it all down it just didn’t capture the essence of the event. It would never get Alexander Vindman’s determination, Bill Taylor’s feeling of betrayal, Marie Yovanovitch’s dignity, or Fiona Hill’s incredible sense of overwhelming competence. None of that would come across unless you saw it.
I hope you did. If not, I’d encourage you to go back and look at at least some highlights because these people were a revelation. Though America is served by millions of public servants both in Washington and overseas, Americans rarely get to see them. What this last week demonstrated was just jaw-dropping in terms of the sheer quality of the talent on display. Any nation served by the likes of Hill, Taylor, Yovanovitch—or others like David Holmes and Laura Cooper—is still a great nation. Or at least a very, very lucky nation.
But having failed in creating a short view of this week, I’m now going to make an even shorter view. Like 60-Second Hamlet, it may miss a few details, but … here you go:
- William Taylor: Years of progress on anti-corruption were thrown in the crapper by that jackass Rudy Giulini and weasel Gordon Sondland who were forcing Ukraine to be more corrupt just to please Trump.
- George Kent: That jackass Giuliani’s efforts to gin up politically motivated investigations destroyed the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine and opened the door for Russia.
- Marie Yovanovitch: That jackass Giuliani launched a smear campaign against me that was obviously false, but spineless Mike Pompeo wouldn’t stand up to Trump.
- Alexander Vindman: Weasel Sondland showed up at the White House demanding Ukraine conduct political investigations into ridiculous things, then conspiracy nut Trump got on the phone and did the same thing.
- Jennifer Williams: Trump’s asinine hold on assistance to Ukraine was a big signal to Vladimir Putin that that he should come on in.
- Kurt Volker: Even though I’ve been around Ukraine for years, and worked directly with that jackass Giuliani, I never understood what Burisma was about. Go figure.
- Tim Morrison: Once I heard Trump’s call, I ran down to the attorney and locked it in the deepest, darkest, dungeon where no one could ever read it. But not because I thought there was anything wrong with the call. Of course there was nothing wrong, Mr. Trump.
- Gordon Sondland: I did quid, I did quo, and I was a pro. We did it, we did it all and then some. And everyone—and I mean everyone—knew what were were up to. But everything I did was really because of that jackass Giuliani, even though I talked to Trump twenty times. Oh, and I also never understood what Burisma meant, even though I did. Go figure.
- Laura Cooper: All those claims about how Ukraine didn’t know about the hold? Bullshit. They knew.
- David Hale: Did anyone mention that Giuliani is a jackass who sabotaged national security for politically motivated investigations demanded by Trump? And that Pompeo is a spineless wimp? Okay, my job is done.
- Fiona Hill: The idea that Ukraine was behind the 2016 election meddling is a a narrative that comes straight out of Putin’s butt before it gets repeated by Trump, the Republicans on the committee, and that jackass Giuliani. Weasel Sondland definitely tried to extort Ukraine and told me he did it on Trump’s orders. And Volker and weasel Sondland are absolutely lying when they say they didn’t understand what Burisma meant. Also, you people should be really sorry your silly laws mean you can’t elect me president (I may have daydreamed that last part).
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David Holmes: Here’s a complete, point-by-point timeline of how conspiracy nut Trump, that jackass Giuliani, weasel Sondland, and spineless Pompeo, spread a stack of lies, sacked a great ambassador, demanded political investigations, screamed about it over the phone, and laughed about it at a Kyiv restaurant. Any questions?
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Ghost of Hamlet’s father: Boo.
Okay, let’s read pundits.
Will Bunch on one characteristic shared by some of the inquiry’s outstanding witnesses.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday’s star witness, former top White House Russia analyst Fiona Hill, spoke in her native accent about growing up in England and becoming “an American by choice” after her dad, a coal miner, was too sick to achieve his own dream of immigrating to the United States. She testified that her father “loved America, its culture, its history and its role as a beacon of hope in the world. He always wanted someone in the family to make it to the United States.”
Hill thus echoed earlier witnesses like ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who said she was grateful to America because her parents — who fled both the totalitarian USSR and, in the case of her mother, Nazi Germany — “did not have the good fortune to come of age in a free society.” Sandwiched between them was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s Ukraine expert, who was born in that country when it was part of the USSR but whose dad brought him and his siblings (including a twin brother, who also became a military officer) to Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa” in 1979, after their mom died.
Did the hearings’ immigrants “get the job done?” That’s still not clear, but they were certainly an impressive lot.
In 1986, the young Vindman twins were even featured briefly in a Ken Burns documentary on the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty as an enduring symbol of America as an immigration refuge. This week, as Vindman addressed the House Intelligence Committee, he had some moving words for his late father: “Dad, I’m sitting here today, in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected professionals ... proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth."
Go read this whole thing. Because it’ll make you feel better, not matter how this ugly affair turns out.
Nancy LeTourneau on Trump replacing national security with a political errand.
Washington Monthly
For some people, the firing of Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch seemed tangential to the events that triggered an impeachment inquiry. I’ve already written that her ouster was part of the second quid pro quo that ensured the cooperation of corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors in providing dirt for Giuliani and Trump to use against Joe Biden. That was recently confirmed in a report by Josh Kovensky.
The Ukrainian official who promised dirt to Rudy Giuliani said that he tied pressure for the firing of Marie Yovanovitch to the investigations sought by President Donald Trump.
Former Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in an interview with the Ukraine news website Ukrainska Pravda that during a January 2019 meeting in New York City, he and Giuliani discussed the prospect of a joint U.S.-Ukraine inquiry into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that Trump’s personal attorney and his allies have sought to use as a political cudgel against Joe Biden.
During that discussion, Lutsenko told the publication, he and Giuliani “exchanged thoughts about the role of Marie Yovanovitch.”
But I was struck by the testimony of several people during the impeachment hearings about how Gordon Sondland presented the idea that, even though he was the Ambassador to the European Union, the president had put him in charge of diplomatic efforts with Ukraine. On Wednesday, Sondland stated that he had stepped into that role because, with the ouster of Yovanovitch, there was no ambassador to Ukraine. So Sondland took over—which left the three amigos (Sondland, Volker, and Perry) in charge.
The replacement of Yovanovitch clearly inflamed many at the State Department — especially the way in which Pompeo allowed an almost endless stream of lies to be lodged against the veteran ambassador without mounting a word of defense. This information, that the replacement of Yovanovitch was itself part of the demands that were being pressed on the part of Giuliani, is important. Hopefully that portion of the action won’t be forgotten when the Intelligence Committee writes up its report for Judiciary.
Art Cullen on the testimony from “Masha” Yovanovitch.
Storm Lake Times
President Trump finally jumped the shark on Twitter last week when he smeared former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch while she was testifying to the House Intelligence Committee. Immediately the words of Joseph Welch, a native of Primghar, Iowa, and general counsel to the Army in 1954, sprang to mind:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
They were written on her stunned face and echoed in the standing ovation Yovanovitch received as she was escorted from the capitol hearing room on Friday. This woman of understatement and restraint has become a symbol of something America yearns for down to its very core, as it did in the McCarthy era ended by Welch’s seven words of exasperated pleading.
Decency. Marie Yovanovitch was cloaked in it.
It’s impossible for me to believe that anyone could have tuned in, even for a moment, and watched Devin Nunes, or Mike Turner, or Jim Jordan yelling at Marie Yovanovitch, and not understood at once which side of the confrontation represented everything America should be.
Trump calls her “bad news” to world leaders. He told the president of Ukraine that she would be “going through some things.” She felt threatened. She was told by a friend to watch her back in Kiev. What does that mean? Get home on the first flight, she was told at 1 a.m. What is going on? She took the call not long after her corruption-fighting Ukrainian patriot friend had been murdered by acid. We imagined her fear.
Why did Trump and Giuliani smear her? To what ends will they go? And, what will stop their recklessness and lawlessness?
Yovanovitch and others of courage stood erect, raised their right hands to tell the truth, and defied Trump’s orders not to testify.
No matter where this goes from here, Marie Yovanovitch should never buy her own drink again in this lifetime.
Leonard Pitts on the bad reaction to the good testimony of Alexander Vindman.
Miami Herald
In her diary entry for July 15, 1944, Anne Frank wrote words that would harrow and challenge generations not yet born: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Less than a month later, “people” would discover Anne and seven other Jews hiding in a secret room. “People” would pack her in a crowded cattle car with only a barrel for a toilet and send her on a three-day journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The following February at Bergen-Belsen, “people” would watch her die of typhus. She was 15 years old.
All of which makes her words deeply troubling. You want them to be true, at times you may even believe them to be true, but at other times you look at the awful things “people” can do, and you wonder if she does not repose in us a faith too large, a faith we do not deserve.
In that regard, the thing Anne Frank said 75 years ago is not unlike the thing Alexander Vindman said on Tuesday. No, that is not to liken his story to hers or to suggest equivalence between them. That would be silly.
But it is to suggest that his words were troubling for much the same reason hers were.
I need to stop there because I’ve already pushed the boundaries of quoting, but you have no excuse to not follow the link over and read the rest.
Karen Tumulty has still more praise for Fiona Hill.
Washington Post
For the former top Russia adviser on President Trump’s National Security Council, the moment of clarity came during the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, when Fiona Hill saw a set of email exchanges involving Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
Sondland’s emails with other officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, showed that a shadow operation outside normal channels was pursuing goals that undermined official U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Their objective: pressuring that government to publicly commit to conducting investigations that could politically benefit President Trump.
“He was being involved in a domestic political errand,” Hill said of Sondland. “And we were being involved in national security, foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.”
The moment when Hill said that during the hearing wasn’t just information, it was high drama. That statement, which Hill made with the force of a revelation showed the clean break between the effort to work for the good of the nation, and the scheme to promote the private political fortunes of Donald Trump.
Those three words from Hill’s testimony Thursday — “domestic political errand” — put a capstone atop two weeks of riveting public hearings. She was a devastating witness, who summarized better than anyone else the crux of the impeachment case against Trump.
But Hill also spoke to something more fundamental about Trump and how he regards the presidency. He views every public servant as his own lackey, there to serve no higher purpose than attending to his whims and advancing his personal interests.
Charles Pierce on the Friday news that Devin Nunes is even more corrupt than we knew.
Esquire
This was the Friday news dump to end all news dumps, the news dump equivalent of that giant barge full of garbage from New York that couldn’t find a home back in 1987. In rough order, it was reported:
1) That Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s Volga Bagmen who now sits under federal indictment, has indicated that he can put Rep. Devin Nunes, the famous White House lawn ornament, in the middle of the effort to concoct the Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election.
2) That the inspector general of the Department of Justice will produce his report on December 9, and early reports are that, while it will be critical of sloppiness in the FBI, it will state that there was no bias against the president* in how the FBI investigation into the involvement of the Russian ratfckers was launched. Not that this will do anything to silence the screeching of the flying monkeys, but it pretty conclusively slams the door on the notion that the previous administration’s concern for the Trump campaign and Russia was the manifestation of some sort of dark manipulation based on inherent bias.
Maybe Parnas is lying — Nunes has so far denied the accusation. But … why was it that Nunes and his aides (including his pretend Ukraine expert) traveled to Vienna? To Vienna, the same place where Parnas and Igor Fruman were running when they were arrested? The same place where Rudy Giuliani was set to go that same evening?
3) That The New York Times reports that the intelligence community has concluded that the entire Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election is an intercontinental okey-doke perpetrated by the Russian intelligence services.
Which is just what Fiona Hill was saying in her testimony, before Republicans on the committee engaged in an epic moment of tag-team man-splaining.
One final note: How did Devin Nunes manage to spend $63,000 in just four days in Vienna? We can assume he ate well. But then … he was also meeting with someone well known for accepting bribes.
Mike Littwin bemoans how un-dramatic the debate was after a day of hearings.
Colorado Independent
The major takeaway from Wednesday night’s Democratic debate was — just guessing here — that most people in the room, most watching from home and probably even most of those on the stage would rather have been talking about Gordon Sondland’s testimony than about the nuances of affordable housing, no matter how important the issue is. (This just in: Apparently all the Dem candidates favor more and better affordable housing.)
The impeachment inquiry, which offers up both real-time drama and a frighteningly close look into the bizarre mind of Devin Nunes, overwhelmed this debate. It’s overwhelming the Democratic primary. For Democrats, this election is about getting rid of Donald Trump. And at this point, the impeachment inquiry offers the slightest of reeds to hold on to. Slight, but something.
If you watched Fiona Hill, formerly Trump’s top Russia adviser in National Security Council, brilliantly take apart the notion that Ukraine, and not Russia, is the real villain here, you couldn’t help but be riveted. Hell, I’m watching the impeachment hearings with one eye — hey, you try it — even as I write this piece on the debate.
In her opening statement, Hill put it this way, “[S]ome of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves…I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016.”
I agree with Littwin that the debate lost most of its impact after a day of the hearings and should have been delayed. And I don’t say it because that day required 15 hours of almost unbroken live-blogging. Well … I don’t just say it because of that.
Michael Tomasky notes that in the debate, Pete Buttigieg didn’t draw expected attacks.
Daily Beast
The oldest and most obvious rule of multi-candidate debates is that the frontrunner is going to get attacked. Happens every time.
But it didn’t happen at Wednesday night’s Democratic debate. Pete Buttigieg is the frontrunner now, at least in the early states, so the conventional wisdom was that this was the night the others were going to put Pete through his paces.
Lo and behold, though, they didn’t. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris both had obvious, hanging-curveball chances to thwack him, and both took a pass. Klobuchar’s moment came early, when a question invited her to belittle his experience and she chose not to do so, saying it was an honor to share the stage with him even as she stressed that women were held to a higher standard. Harris’ came late, when a question gave her a chance to follow up on an earlier criticism of Buttigieg on racial issues, and she said well, I was just responding to a question I was asked.
There’s at least one good reason for holding back at this point — it’s still early. There’s time for Buttigieg’s surge in Iowa and New Hampshire to fade, just as other candidates have seen their time at the front come and go. There’s time for Harris, or Klobuchar to have their own surge. Or time for Sanders or Warren or Biden to return to the top.
What gives there? The Occam’s Razor answer is that the rest of them aren’t taking the idea of Buttigieg as frontrunner seriously. And they’re probably right. Yes, he’s a good Iowa candidate, not just for the state but for the particular kind of Democrat who goes to caucus in Iowa. That one New Hampshire poll with him way ahead is pretty obviously an outlier.
Jonathan Chait convenes a group sessions to ponder something I’ve pondered often.
New York Magazine
Ben: Jordan Weissmann wrote at Slate on Thursday, “After almost every Democratic presidential debate, I’ve found myself asking some version of the same nagging question: Why don’t more people want to vote for Cory Booker?” Booker, Weissmann notes, can come off as corny and will never be truly loved by the left because of his corporate ties and charter-school-supporting past. But he boasts considerable credentials as a candidate: his longtime work on criminal-justice reform, his sometimes-successful effort to transform Newark as mayor, his intelligence. (Like Pete Buttigieg, he’s a Rhodes Scholar.) Yet Booker is polling only at about 2 percent nationally, and there is little indication that he’ll even qualify for the next debate in December. Why aren’t Democrats worried about the party’s leftward swing even taking a flyer on him?
I like Booker — even though he’s painfully, demonstrably wrong on the charter school issue. But he’s a terrific speaker, a genuine peacemaker, and a deep thinker who doesn’t come off as arrogant. I really wish he was doing better.
Zak: I think he exists at an unfortunate (for him) nexus of anxieties for primary voters. The left doesn’t like him, even though he’s ideologically to the left of most moderates in the field, and moderates who prize electability are probably dead set on the notion that a white candidate with demonstrable appeal to more conservative voters is the better bet. This makes his lane a little muddy. Even the majority of black voters — who, because he’s black, are presumed to be his natural core constituency — want someone they’re fairly certain can and will win.
That correlation between “white” and “electable” ought to have been disproven, especially when it comes to Democratic primary voters. But I’m not sure I can find a better reason that Booker is not doing better in this race.