What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

So how should someone following along at home, make sense of Taylor and Kent’s testimony so far? What overall picture do you think they have painted in terms of efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to open investigations into the Bidens? Do we have a better sense how intimately Trump was involved?

There is a long and complicated backstory behind Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine, but it appears to stem in part from an unproven conspiracy theory that Ukrainian law enforcement officials had tried to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign by releasing information about Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, that eventually forced him to step down. If you’re interested, here’s some background on the origins of that theory.

The staff attorney just asked Taylor a question that came close to asking whether he sees Trump’s position as extortion, bribery, a quid pro quo. Taylor said that he could describe the dynamic as he saw it, but declined to agree to those terms.