What Went Down In Maguire’s Whistleblower Testimony

Top-line thought as this winds down: DNI Maguire is acting and testifying as if these are normal times. These are not normal times.

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?