Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Okay, we're back in session at the Ambassador Yovanovitch hearing.

If you missed the morning session and want to catch up, that thread can be found here.

Feel free to mute this thread if you aren't interested...

1/

https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1195348120584032256?s=20

Devin "I'm Suing a Make-Believe Cow" Nunes opens the afternoon session with a snotty, sarcastic, insipid prattle about Yovanovitch "graduating" from secret tryouts to make it to the public hearing team.

He is such an effing dunce.

It never fails to astound me just how successful Devin Nunes is at reminding you of his sheer stupidity.

You would think by the law of averages, he would someday accidentally say something semi-bright.

Nope, 24/7 dopiness.

Nunes tries to yield time to his equally dipshitted colleague from New York, Elise Stefanik, I believe.

Schiff drops the hammer on that charade. Reminds Nunes that he can only yield to counsel.

Stefanik tries to grandstand. Schiff essentially tells her to stick a sock in it.

Minority Counsel Steve Castor has now taken control of the hearing.

This dude is remarkably unimpressive as examining counsel go. I mean, he doesn't have much to work with but the guy is no Jack McCoy. That's all I'm saying.

Thus far, I can't follow the strategy behind Castor's questioning. He seems to be trying to nibble away at minutiae of the timeline but if I can't follow this, safe to say the Fox News-viewing audience is hearing whale sounds and white noise here.

Castor is off to a bad start.

Castor briefly asks about what Ambassador Yovanovitch is doing now that she is back stateside.

Implies she somehow profited from being threatened by a President because upon her return she found additional employment in academia.

She shunts it aside effortlessly.

Since Castor's questioning is so benign and toothless, allow me to just interject here rather than transcribe things that are going immediately into the void of forgotten testimony.

A good counselor has specific points they're building towards. Their questions are inductive...

If the "jury" can't follow where you're going, you don't get the same impact even if you manage to get there.

A counselor without a destination and clear line of inquiry to get there hunts around laterally looking for a straw to grasp at... Not terribly effective.

Yovanovitch, as a witness, makes a rambling, opaque array of questions even less effective because she delivers deep, substantive answers.

She is negative-soundbite-proof.

She can't be baited into providing an extractable one-liner even out of context.

Castor asks Yovanovitch if SHE did enough to alert the State Dept to the campaign being mounted against her.

Stupid question. As we learned Wednesday, Bill Taylor sent one cable to a head of the State Dept over his entire career:

The one he sent to Pompeo about Yovanovitch.

It appears that Steve Castor is trying to victim-blame by suggesting a venerated foreign service staffer with a three-decade history of honorable service somehow aided in her own mistreatment by not doing more complaining about it up the foodchain.

Asinine. OMG. Effing asinine.

I know I am veering off the transcription here but I am somewhat taken aback by the impotence of the cross-examination here.

This is so ineffective, I'm a bit shocked. This is aural Ambien. The morning was a Rockstar energy drink. This is soporific.

For once, Democrats are on the right side of the meeting flow...

This morning was riveting. The long break hurt viewership. The opening block here will drive away many on the right.

By the time we get to Jim Jordan, he's gonna be playing to an empty house.

Let me amend the above a tiny bit.

It is not unreasonable to think Republicans might be boring this down on purpose. They know they can't impugn Yovanovitch as a witness and *want* people to turn off their TVs.

The morning was damning enough for that to be moot though.

Castor: In your deposition, you acknowledged the President has longstanding concerns about corruption in Ukraine. Is that correct?

Yov: (pauses) That's what he says...

LOL. That didn't go the way Castor wanted.

Castor references a Ken Vogel story back when Vogel worked for Politico (now at NYT).

This is a good time to point out that Vogel singlehandedly did more to aid the perpetuation of Giuliani's anti-Biden conspiracy theories than any other reporter.

The NYT should be ashamed.

Castor is so roundabout and rambling at times, it is hard to even grasp what he is asking let alone what he is hoping to get at...

Armed with no other knowledge, this would sound like a cross-examination by an attorney who decided to just wing it rather than prepare.

So far, the only point Steve Castor has managed to cement is that Republicans have no substantive criticism of Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch's testimony.

If Trump is watching this, he must be losing his mind.

This is the least effective cross I've seen in a hearing yet.

I'm honestly curious to see how Jim Jordan handles his eventual five-minute blocks.

My guess is that R's have placed all of their hopes in the dimwitted shriek factory, Rep. Elise Stefanik, as a more suitable aggressor.

Yovanovitch will make short work of her.

Castor wraps up his 45-minute block with the weakest of whimpers.

Doesn't even close with a salient question leaving a crisp point in the audience's mind.

Just impotently says he's out of time and slinks off.

Man, that was terrible.

Adam Schiff opens the five-minute rounds by rather artfully dismissing Devin Nunes inane point that Yovanovitch and all of this testimony is irrelevant.

Schiff (paraphrased): You know who thought you were relevant? Donald Trump. Let's review what he said on his 'perfect' call.

Schiff winds up his block of questions. Turns it over to Nunes.

Nunes yields to the absolutely insufferable Elise Stefanik.

She is horrible.

Stefanik is race-talking through questioning that is the polar opposite of what I praised in the morning session.

Long statements yielding only yes/no answers.

This is earwash to audiences. I'm a careful listener and this is white noise. An epic word vomit of nothingness.

The subtext here is that Republicans have rolled out Miss Angry because the optics are too poor in having the usual cast of angry white dudes yell-talking at a woman witness.

Stefanik lacks the gravitas or chops for this.

She also lacks the oratorical skills.

She is making the classic error of jamming a ridiculous volume of 45 RPM bullshit into her five-minute block.

Not one human being who listened to that took away anything of consequence.

If you're talking fast, you're saying nothing.

That was a rhetorical F. Total fail.

Further, Republicans overestimated how level they thought the playing field would be with an acerbic, disrespectful younger woman berating a sympathetic, accomplished veteran ambassador.

Nothing about Stefanik vs. Yovanovitch played well.

Stefanik came off as an impertinent ass

Not to belabor the point but the optics of Stefanik - a woman who brags on her Twitter bio of having been the youngest person elected to Congress - browbeating Yovanovitch were terrible.

Trump's base skews older and more patrician. Yovanovitch is a closer proxy than Stefanik.

Rep. Conaway picked up the weak, dangling point made by Castor earlier about Yovanovitch somehow doing just fine despite being treated horribly.

Pushed it one question too far. Asked if people at State treated her differently to which Yov says she has received widespread support

Conaway was aiming to land the point that Yovanovitch wasn't ostracized or mistreated in the workplace after being summarily yanked home.

Instead, he gave her an opening to testify that she is widely respected internally - which directly refutes Trump's defamation TODAY.

One interesting, albeit minor point, about the questioning today:

Repub men are clearly afraid of the optics of interrupting and talking over Yovanovitch.

As a result, she is being allowed to answer questions - and that entirely robs them of their go-to tactic: grandstanding.

And, just as I hit send, Rep. Turner blows a gasket, tries to talk over Ambassador Yovanovitch and gets gaveled down by Schiff.

Man, this has been such an epic failure by Republicans... and that is in no small part due to Adam Schiff running a very tight ship. The man is good.

Rep. Turner is now off on some inscrutable tangent about a private citizen meeting with foreign relations staff in 2004.

He was trying to establish some paper-thin precedent that would make Giuliani's actions less outrageous.

Didn't get there. Out of time. LOL.

As an aside, I have now commenced fantasizing about the very large beer I will be drinking upon completion of today's hearings.

I also intend to eat a burger the size of a small child.

I am quite hungry.

Yov: "What we do is inherently non-partisan. It is about our national security interests. It is not about what is good for a particular party at a particular time. It has to be about the greater interest of our security in what, frankly, is an increasingly dangerous world."

Print that one. It was the pithy summary of the call to service of career foreign relations staff.

Yovanovitch, like Taylor and Kent before her, exudes the selfless dedication of public servants who are patriotic Americans above the fray of domestic politics.

So far, Ambassador Yovanovitch has done nothing but burnish her standing and credibility today.

They not only haven't laid a glove on her; they've cemented how much the worse we are as a country for the removal of Yovanovitch from her post.

Yovanovitch caps a five-minute block of Republican questions in crushing fashion:

"I don't dispute a President's right to replace an ambassador [...]... but I do wonder what it was necessary to smear my reputation."

Repub. falls all over himself to cut her off.

Now up, Rep. Speier, who I have previously called "a velvet hammer".

She is the embodiment of badassery. I love me some Rep. Speier action. She is a baller for real.

Rep. Speier raising a powerful point:

Now all foreign service staff needs to live in fear that even devoted servants to American foreign policy might be vulnerable to an illicit, shadow foreign policy being executed in darkness for Trump's personal gain.

Rep. Speier closes. Rep. Chris Stewart, Repub from Utah, now takes the mic.

Opens with some asshatted horseshit about witch hunts over Russian collusion.

Sit down, dumdum. The adults are talking.

Want to laugh with me?

Rep. Stewart: "I think support for impeachment is going to be LESS after these hearings."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Trump is getting crushed today. This has been a brutal hearing for him. The premise this is helping him is laugh out loud funny.

As an overall observation, Republicans are not only playing small-ball today; they're playing fifteen scattered versions of small-ball.

There is no continuity or commonality between their lines of inquiry.

As a result, there is just no gravity. It is just so damn weak.

Rep. Quigley: "Man, it's like a Hallmark movie! You ended up at Georgetown. It's all okay!"

(all laugh)

Quigley: "But it's not, is it. [..] It wasn't your preference to be smeared by the President, was it?"

Boom. This soundbite...

Quigley: "It's like bad reality TV brought to you by someone who knows a lot about that."

Ouch. The shade.

Quigley's first minute has been made-for-TV gold.

You'll be seeing the clips tonight. Trump is going to steam.

Schiff picks up on the earlier victim-blaming. OMG, perfect...

Says victims are sometimes asked why they didn't fight back harder.

Yovanovitch says "I thought it was important for others to stand up for me."

That was a powerful moment.

Fuckface McBigmouth, Elise Stefanik, now back at the mic.

She is somehow talking even faster than before.

My lord, this woman is insufferably grating.

She has the charm of a urethral scrape.

Seriously, she is motor-mouthing so quickly and with such a condescending, arrogant intonation that the only effect of her screed is disliking her.

My lord, they miscalculated.

...and as if that wasn't bad enough, Stefanik yielded her last minute to Jim Jordan - America's jacket-less congressman.

Jordan isn't even asking a question. He's just ranting and raving.

Literally didn't ask a question.

Fuck off, asshole.

Up comes Rep. Swalwell, consistently good at this...

In rebuttal to earlier asshatted peacocking by Stefanik about calling the whistleblower to testify, Swalwell reads in an array of quotes from Trump calling the WB a traitor and calling for their execution.

Well done.

Swalwell now establishing that Giuliani and Trump were not two independent parties acting in the Ukraine.

Giuliani was an agent of Trump directly and therefore all of his actions were both directed by, and accrue to the guilt of, Trump himself.

Swalwell: Isn't it true that the only time the aid went to Ukraine was after the whistleblower blew the whistle?

Yovanovitch: Yes

Swalwell: You don't get points for taking your hand out of the cookie jar when caught.

Another kerpow. Swalwell is good at this.

Off topic, I've got a couple notifications for people kindly supporting my beer tab via the links in my bio. Can't thank you enough... Sorry for not replying yet in-stream. My notifications are blowing up a bit but suffice it to say, thank you deeply...

I've lost touch with who is asking questions now and to be honest, not sure where he was going with his questions.

Didn't go anywhere.

Now we're on to Rep. Joaquin Castro.

Opens by establishing that no one in the State Department ever even gave Yov a reason for her removal.

Paraphrasing:

Castro: Have you ever in your career heard of an American president asking a foreign government to investigate an American citizen?

Yovanovitch: No.

Up comes Rep. Ratcliffe.

He's another piece of work.

And, right on cue, he tries to pull Yovanovitch down the asinine rabbit hole of Obama, Biden, and Burisma.

This won't go the way he intends.

Rep. Ratcliffe keeps saying "The Obama-Biden State Department" as if that will somehow sound ominous.

He is trying to insinuate that it was known and understood that Burisma and Hunter Biden's role on their board was a big deal.

Yovanovitch isn't really a fact-witness there.

On the one hand, this line of inquiry is not really germane to Yovanovitch role or testimony today. So, it lacks the weight of significant discovery or meaning on the merits.

On the other, Repubs are just grasping at straws to kick up dust anywhere they can for effect.

And like every other Repub today, Rep. Ratcliffe pushed it one question too far.

He had accomplished a bit but then pressed for the close and missed.

Asked if the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor involved in the original Burisma investigation was eyebrow-raising...

He had laid a trail of breadcrumbs of innuendo and tried to wrap it up with the biggest innuendo of them all - that Biden had done something wrong.

Yovanovitch, almost nonchalantly, bats it down with a dismissive "I don't think so."

Pulled the rug out in barely a whisper.

This has been a recurrent theme today.

Republicans have repeatedly tried to build to some at least mildly salacious suggestion and have just effed it up over and over.

They've mismanaged their time and flat out not gotten there before losing the mic...

They've tried to lead the horse to water only to have Yovanovitch kick the questioning aside just as the lake looked to be within sight.

It has been a remarkably impotent effort.

Bumbling, weak, toothless.

Almost shockingly so.

We are now on another break.

Not sure how long we will be out or how much we will have left when we return.

If there is indeed a benevolent God, we'll wrap this up by the time happy hour starts. I'm hungry AF and ready for a beverage.

Well, that was brief. Ran to 7/11, turned on the radio in the car and was greeted with the nonsensical prattling of Jim Jordan.

I won’t even bother transcribing his insipid bullshit.

Summing up Jordan's block:

Jordan rambled on and on about how Ukrainian politicians allegedly preferred Hillary Clinton to Trump and then tried to suggest that somehow rose to the level of a legitimate reason for concern on Trump's part.

Umm, even we were to stipulate that Jordan's allegations were true, that would do no more than affirm that Trump's concerns with personal and political rather than matters of United States foreign policy.

Yovanovitch says essentially the same. There was no there, there.

Once again, a Republican tried to grandstand and filibuster and was stymied by the fact that Schiff controls the gavel and therefore the witness gets the last word.

Jim Jordan, et al, have no capacity to pull the same bullshit they pulled when they were in the majority.

Current questioner, I know not who, drilling into the grisly story from this morning of the Ukrainian mayor murdered in by an acid attack.

Makes the point I raised earlier that the 1 am call to pull Yovanovitch out of theater must have been terrifying with that as the backdrop.

The prior questioner, oddly enough, appears to have been Republican Rep. Maloney.

I was thrown off because his questioning was non-partisan, he sounded nothing like his peers.

Good for him.

Now up: Rep. Val Demings of Florida.

Rep. Demings hammers home that the President, his Chief of Staff Mulvaney, and staff seem desperate to smear the good names and reputations of career civil servants.

Now up, Rep. Krishnamoorthi.

I suspect we are near the end of five-minute questioning blocks.

Rep. Krishnamoorthi connects the dots between Sondland, Trump and Giuliani.

Raises the fact that Ambassador Yovanovitch's removal created the perfect one-month window for Giuliani, et al, to hijack Ukrainian policy.

Oooh, well done...

Rep. Krishnamoorthi: Are you concerned other ambassadors might suffer the same fate as you?

Yovanovitch: Yes.

Krishna: Is it a feature of authoritarianism to have corrupt figures hijack foreign policy?

Yov: Yes.

We are now done with the questioning and Nunes is issuing a replay of his insipid opening remarks.

The man is a goddamned dunce.

I won't bore you with more than that synopsis.

Schiff now closing the hearing with final remarks.

Lauds Yovanovitch for her courage in testifying and its effect in emboldening other public servants to honor subpoenas as well.

Reflects on the damage being done to our diplomatic corp who bravely serve our national interests.

"What you are is what holds our country together...what holds our foreign policy together."

Points out that it is the work of people like Ambassador Yovanovitch that often keeps the United States out of wars.

Wraps it up by reiterating that failing at a scheme is not innocence.

And finally, hammers home forcefully that Giuliani has entirely indicted himself as the frontman for the President's conspiracy - a conspiracy that needed Yovanovitch out of the way to succeed.

"There is no camouflaging that corrupt intent."

Bangs gavel.

Republicans erupt angrily.

Demand to be heard.

Schiff gets up and walks off as their mics get cut off.

Wow. HOW'S THAT FOR PIZZAZZ?!

That was quite the closing moment.

You'll be seeing that one on the shows tonight.

And on that note, thanks for reading along... We are adjourned.

At long last, I can go get something to eat - and get a tall, frosty cold one to wash it down.

Thanks to y'all who helped fund that errand.

I am famished. And thirsty. More thirsty than famished. Thanks for the support!

Two postscripts:

1) Rep. Sean Maloney is a Democrat representing NY-12. Not sure why there were multiple D's in a row. Some R's must have passed on the oppty.

2) Yovanovitch exited to rousing applause. Quite an inspiring and gratifying moment...