What Went Down In Maguire’s Whistleblower Testimony

I think Amelia’s final thoughts are smart. Coming into today, there were two potential cover-ups the Democrats were interested in, outside the allegations that Trump asked Ukraine to intervene to smear Joe Biden. One cover-up, according to the whistleblower’s allegation, was whether call logs were being marked as secret to hide them from those who could leak their concerning contents. The other was whether Maguire intentionally kept the complaint and IG report away from Congress to shield the president. Today showed there isn’t much fuel in the latter line of inquiry. Democrats may disagree with Maguire’s decision, but proving it was politically motivated seems unlikely. (Similar to Comey’s decision to release Clinton’s letter days before Election Day in 2016!) So now Democrats will have to leave that strange dead end behind and concentrate more on the stuff that actually could move public opinion.

Big takeaways from this should be 1) Maguire’s refusal to deny that he talked to the president about this complaint; 2) the “unprecedented” nature of this complaint; and 3) the “credibility” of the whistleblower complaint. Ultimately, what we want to know is 1) is the whistleblower complaint accurate; and 2) did Trump or Barr try to actively prevent this complaint from coming to light?

We’re getting close to the end here. Today’s hearing with Maguire involved a lot of stage-setting and not a lot of fireworks. But as it went on, I thought the Democrats did an increasingly good job of framing the process concerns (how the complaint was dealt with) in terms that people can understand — i.e., if the inspector general thought the allegations were credible and it involved something as serious as the president pressuring a foreign power to investigate a political rival, why didn’t you think Congress needed to see the complaint?

Going forward, I’m not sure how productive it will be to focus on whether Maguire did something wrong in his handling of the complaint, but I think overall the Democrats did a fairly good job with a witness who wasn’t really inclined to cooperate with them, especially the later questioners. And now the question is really who else the Democrats will be able to call to testify — Coats? Atkinson? Giuliani?