Apparently, President Donald Trump, who is just large sack of yams mashed with sadness, decided that he would try to distract from the impeachment hearings today. He first tried by releasing the pseudo-transcript of a phone call between him and Ukrainian President Zelensky that occurred before the one where he pressured Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden's son.
Of course, it's a mostly banal congratulatory call, although Zelensky has the air of a desperate fanboy and Trump is his usual lumpen self. At one point, Trump pretty much compliments Zelensky on the hotness of the women in his country: "When I owned Miss Universe, they always had great people. Ukraine was always very well represented."
Republican Devin Nunes eagerly read it into the record of the hearing as if it was a pot of exoneration gold for Trump when all it really proved is that, occasionally, Trump didn't commit an impeachable offense.
Besides, the rest of the day revealed that not only did Republicans have nothing to counter the genuinely cruel behavior of Donald Trump and his minions towards former Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch, but they looked smaller and pettier before someone who spent her career working for her country. Yovanovitch, composed with an edge of emotion every now and then, laid out how Trump's mistreatment of her and his bumblefuck betrayal of the work of the Foreign Service officers was a dangerous precedent.
Even more so, Trump came across, unsurprisingly, as a bully and a cheap mobster, aided and abetted by other cheap mobsters, like Rudy Giuliani and Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. Trump and Republicans have been chanting for weeks to "Read the transcript," the memo that the White House put out of the second call, the July 26 one between Trump and Zelensky. So when that memo was quoted, remember that that is what Trump was admitting he said. And what he said about Yovanovitch was "Well, she' s going to go through some things."
Asked about that by Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman, Yovanovitch responded, "It didn't sound good. It sounded like a threat." Goldman asked her if she felt "threatened," and she said, "I did."
That should be that on impeachment. It's simple: The president of the United States threatened an American ambassador to another leader. What more do you need?
The whole thing is pathetic because, as Yovanovitch said, Trump could have just recalled her for no reason, but he decided to use Giuliani and assorted goons to smear "the woman," as Trump made sure to specify to Zelensky. You may have the right to fire someone. You don't have the right to spread lies about them because they suit your political purposes. And your decisions can be questioned, even investigated. That's how this shit works.
But Trump wasn't going to let "the woman" get away with talking shit about him. So, of course, of course, of course, he tweeted in the middle of the hearing. Of course, of course, of fucking course, it was a completely scurrilous, lie-filled, stupid attack on Yovanovitch. "Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him," he said, before asserting his "absolute right" to change ambassadors, which not even Yovanovitch was questioning. For the record, she was a low-level officer in Somalia so I'm pretty sure it'd be awfully fucking hard to be responsible for that nation's descent into chaos. And, yeah, Zelensky brought up Yovanovitch because Trump had brought her up first and he was obviously, and nauseatingly, sucking up to Trump.
The real damage, though, is that in real time, with the fucking nation watching, Trump committed witness intimidation. He was trying to silence her, discredit her, and send a message to anyone who would fuck with him. And to anyone who says it wasn't intimidation, you haven't been subject Trump's idiot hordes sending death and rape threats to any woman who dares cross him. And to anyone who would say, "Well, it can't be intimidation because she wouldn't have known about the tweet if Committee Chair Adam Schiff hadn't read it to her," I'd say, "Shut up, you dumb motherfucker. They take breaks. You don't think she'd've been told about it, you savage shitheel? Just shut the fuck up!" and then I'd throw my drink in your stupid face.
Republicans barely tried to ding Yovanovitch. They knew they had nothing. Oh, sure, they tried to say that her testimony had nothing to do with the subject of impeachment - the attempt to bribe Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden - but, as Schiff and others said, umm, she's in the phone call. How is she not important? The one attempt at a gotcha moment was when a couple of the GOP stooges brought up that, prior to her 2016 confirmation hearing before the Senate, Democrats prepping her had raised Biden and the Ukrainian company that hired him, Burisma. To Republicans, this showed that Democrats knew something was hinky with the deal. But, really, and come the fuck on, it was because they suspected that the GOP would ask about it.
But here's the thing: In that confirmation hearing and in written questions, not a single Republican senator bothered to do so. It didn't fucking matter enough to them to do so. And she was confirmed on a voice vote.
Then the day ended with the closed-door testimony of State Department aide David Holmes, who overheard a blustering Trump on the phone with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland talking specifically about investigating Biden, followed by the revelation that one of the Russians who helped smear Yovanovitch, Lev Parnas, was sent by Trump to pressure Ukraine on the investigation.
This dime store Mafia in the White House is getting its ass handed to it by the bureaucrats who actually give a shit about the United States.