Impeachment Briefing: How Republicans Are Using Hearings

“The Trump administration changed course from its predecessor and provided lethal defensive assistance to the Ukraine,” Steve Castor, the Republican staff lawyer on the Intelligence Committee, said yesterday. Hours later, Mr. Trump posted a video of the conservative radio personality Mark Levin making the same point.

Jeremy: “The Bidens, their argument goes, were doing corrupt things themselves. It’s a classic Trump argument: ‘What about them? They did it. Why am I getting in trouble for something they did? I know you are, but what am I?’ The best example of this is what he did with the Clintons, after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. ‘So what if I said this horrible thing on tape and I got caught? So what if I engaged in this locker room talk? What Bill Clinton did is way worse.’”

On Wednesday, Mr. Sondland testified that he saw the Ukraine campaign as a clear “quid pro quo.” He also recalled that the president once told him: “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.” Mr. Trump soon read out those lines from handwritten notes on the White House lawn. Representatives Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, two of Mr. Trump’s favorite allies, tweeted out the lines around the same time in the hearing room. Hours later, Republicans had a poster board behind the dais in the hearing room that read, “I WANT NOTHING.”

Jeremy: “Lines are taken out, isolated, stripped of context and meant to look as if they’ve completely cleared the president. If you turned on Sean Hannity’s show the night of Mr. Sondland’s testimony, what you heard was not Mr. Sondland admitting a quid pro quo, but the idea that ‘this is over for the Democrats.’ He spun it as Democrats having their worst day yet and having been humiliated, when in fact we learned new and really damaging info about the president.”

When Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified on Tuesday, multiple Republicans on the committee, including Mr. Nunes, asked questions that implied he had been working in conjunction with the anonymous whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the investigation. As BuzzFeed reported, an article on Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump website, tying Colonel Vindman to the whistle-blower had been widely shared on Facebook.

This morning, Senator Marsha Blackburn leveled the same kind of accusation on Twitter:



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