We begin today’s roundup with Fareed Zakaria and his account of how the corrupt quid pr quo was almost televised:
Imagine Zelensky’s dilemma. By the time I met with him in Kyiv, he knew the aid had been released, but the backstory had not yet broken into public view. Ukrainian officials I spoke to about the release of the aid were delighted but a little surprised and unsure as to what had happened. Zelensky and his team were probably trying to figure out whether they should still do the interview.
A few days later, on Sept. 18 and 19, The Post broke the story wide open. The interview was called off. We are, of course, still trying to get it.
Jonathan Chait points out that the main defense — hearsay — doesn’t hold water:
But it is not “hearsay” when officials are following expressly communicated orders through a chain of command. And it’s certainly not hearsay when somebody literally hears the boss say the order.
And as USA Today points out in an editorial, it’s the White House itself that is blocking those firsthand accounts:
The White House's refusal to provide witnesses, as well as much needed documentation, for a legitimate and serious congressional inquiry accomplishes little but undercut efforts by Republicans to come to Trump's aid.
One of the few coherent arguments that GOP lawmakers could make Wednesday was that the witnesses were sometimes providing secondhand or thirdhand information. All the more reason, then, to go to the source. But several of the key witnesses, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, are balking. [...]
The stonewalling can only contribute to the perception that the administration knows it did wrong and is trying to hide that fact as much as it can. Ultimately, refusal to cooperate with congressional subpoenas might itself be impeachable conduct.
Rick Wilson on the “perfect” call:
Even in Trump’s empire of lies, reality sometimes penetrates.
On just the first day of impeachment hearings, the fantasy that the Republicans on the committee, led by the comically incompetent Devin Nunes, would shift the public dialogue from Trump’s overt corruption to Biden, Burisma, and loco conspiracy theories was utterly detonated. The idea that the Republicans would make the hearing about the original whistleblower was also shattered.
Peter Nicholas at The Atlantic on the president’s approach :
No one seems to unnerve Trump more than that original whistle-blower, who kick-started the House impeachment investigation into how he browbeat Ukraine into digging up political dirt on Biden. Again and again, he’s painted this person as a deep-state partisan acting in cahoots with Democrats.
That the whistle-blower has stayed out of view seems to have left Trump only more aggrieved—he prefers a flesh-and-blood foe. “I want to find out who’s the whistle-blower,” he said yesterday at a joint news conference with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as the first public impeachment hearing unfolded on Capitol Hill.
On a final note,
Joan Walsh cautions us to stop comparing the current inquiry to Watergate:
Is all the looking backward because it’s too scary to look forward? My objection isn’t to parallels between the abuses involved in Watergate and the Ukraine scandal, because they exist, but to the expectations of what Democrats ought to do, and how, and jumping to the conclusion that they’re botching it. They may be, but fetishizing the Watergate investigations ignores how much media, politics, and the GOP have changed in the intervening 45 years.