What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

This hearing reminds me of the Comey, Cohen and Mueller hearings in some ways. Bad presidential conduct is described in legalistic but still quite explicit language. Except in the case of Cohen, the key speaker(s) is a white man with lots of credentials who can’t be easily cast as a liberal Trump hater. The conduct has been reported and basically confirmed already in the big papers.

I wonder if, for theatrical purposes, Democrats would have been better off not leaking the details from Taylor’s closed-door testimony. This would all be explosive news if we hadn’t heard it before, but I don’t think it landed with quite the same oomph as it would have if it had broken live on national TV.

Mulvaney (who as readers may recall ordered the freeze on the security assistance) “maintained a skeptical view of Ukraine,” according to Taylor. Another witness, former White House official Catherine Croft, has also testified that Mulvaney briefly halted the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine last year because he was concerned that “Russia would react negatively to the provision of Javelins to the Ukraine.”