I have been watching the impeachment procedures through the eyes of Trump defenders. I know the democrats want to impeach Trump. There is very little I can learn by listening or watching their questioning. Instead, I have been purposely fast-forwarding to the points in the hearings where Trump’s defenders question the witnesses. I want to see if I’m missing something. Perhaps, like Devin Nunez claims, this is all a hoax. On a separate note, Nunez cannot, even if he tried, make himself more into a caricature of a Trump ally. I understand why the TV personalities do it, that makes sense. In a way, this is their job, to entertain their audiences. Nunez (I refuse to all him Mister, as he acts like a 5-year-old) is an elected official, whose responsibility is to the people that elected him and while he and others can ally themselves with Trump, they cannot do it at the expense of making the office to which they were elected, appear as a kindergarten play day. It is embarrassing to watch a grown man, who is not a TV personality, behave this way.
But I digress. The fact of the matter is that while Lt. Col. Vindman and Ms. Williams added to the evidence that the call was anything close to “Perfect”, and corroborated the complaint from the whistle-blower, the second set of witnesses, did a good job painting the various actions by the administration which had seemed suspicious, as indifferent acts of government.
The second set of witnesses were Mr. Morrison (Vindman’s direct manager) and Special Envoy to the Ukraine Mr. Volker. The latter was part of what Ambassador to Ukraine, Mr. Taylor, referred to as the unofficial channel. Both witnesses, when questioned by Trump’s defenders, helped to shift the narrative from malevolent to bureaucratic. As an example, the reason there are not recorded transcripts, it seems, is because that is a normal procedure. The normal procedure is not to record the call, store it and transcribe it, rather, it is to store an edited version of it. Another action that had reeked with suspicion was the storage of the edited transcript in a more secretive server. It seems this issue was bureaucratic negligence. Mr. Morrison realized the call could be construed problematic and alerted the white house attorney. The white house attorney then placed a request to elevate the access level for the transcript and rather than elevate it where it was, someone decided to simply move it to the higher security sever.
The way the actions were described, left you thinking that while there may be fire where there is smoke, that fire may not have been caused by that phone call and it’s simply the result of a chaotic white house. I buy that.
The next witness to testify is Ambassador to the EU Sondland. We shall see how Trump’s defenders do with him.
