What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

I’m piggy-backing on smart Amelia comments here, but I continue think this current Nunes line — the president was concerned about foreign interference, hence everything here is fine and normal — is Republicans’ best line of defense. There’s not any evidence to support it, and it doesn’t really pass the smell test, but how do you prove what was in Trump’s head? You just end up in an empirical dead end of sorts.

A couple of lines of attack to watch out for as Republicans begin their defense of Trump: 1) the process is unfair to Trump; 2) all of these witnesses’ knowledge is secondhand or thirdhand; 3) Trump’s communications with Zelensky were perfectly normal.

So, we’re off the the races with Nunes, who is doing another opening statement sort of deal here, saying that the “transcript” (as he is calling it; it’s really more of a summary) of Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine describes a benign interaction between two foreign leaders.