Pierce: Republicans Barely Questioned the Witnesses. They Went for Delay Tactics, Half-Truths, and U
Republicans Barely Questioned the Witnesses. They Went for Delay Tactics, Half-Truths, and Utter Bullshit.
The case is simple. The president* abused his power in pursuit of his latest scam.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
NOV 13, 2019
...Make no mistake. If the hearings on Tuesday were a criminal trial, the jury wouldn’t have been out long enough to order lunch. The President* of the United States ran a cheap-assed, third-rate shakedown of the new president of an embattled ally for the purpose of enlisting the new president of the embattled ally in the ratfcking of the 2020 election. Both of those are crimes. Putting them together is a third crime.
The Republican defense was aimed at defending Fox News talking points, or giving your drunk uncle arguments to raise over the cranberry salad in a couple of weeks, or defending the right of the president* to make policy based on whatever conspiracy theory most recently got snagged on the stalagmites of his mind. It certainly wasn’t based on defending the president*’s actions as regards the transaction he tried to force on poor Volodymyr Zelensky. Because, as was obvious from every second of the minority’s participation in Tuesday’s hearings, there simply is no defense for what the president* did.
George Kent and Bill Taylor were exemplary witnesses. (Taylor, in particular, could develop a lucrative side gig consulting for law firms as to how prepare people to testify.) They never strayed beyond their obvious mandates, which was to tell the story of the shakedown from the point of view of career diplomats who suddenly found themselves submarined by a cabal led by the president*’s half-mad personal lawyer. And Taylor dropped the morning’s only real bombshell: an account from his staff about how some of them had overheard the president* refer to “the investigations” in a phone call to Ambassador Gordon Sondland on the day after the now-infamous July 25 shakedown phone call. And Kent was firm in his testimony that neither Joe Biden nor his son, Hunter, had done anything untoward as regards the removal of a corrupt state prosecutor. But the real show was the Republicans, who had nothing, but who delivered it with a kind of frantic verve that occasionally brushed up against semi-coherence.
There was Minority Counsel Robert Castor, who sounded as though he’d taken the gig three minutes before the hearing began, and who did a very impressive imitation of Rick Moranis’s courtroom performance in the second Ghostbusters film. At one point, Castor asked Kent and Taylor if they could “guess” how many times Giuliani met with various figures in the scandal. But, to be fair to Castor, Clarence Darrow couldn’t have created a case out of that with which Castor had to work.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a29788717/republicans-impeachment-hearings-devin-nunes/
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