What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

The other thing that Castor seems to be doing is taking advantage of a very, very literal reading of Zelensky’s comments — stripping out the context that Ukraine is incredibly dependent on U.S. aid, and thus a Ukrainian president would have lots of reasons to present a happy and cooperating face to U.S. officials.

This line of questioning has been hard to follow, as Taylor’s answers aren’t as clear. But I think what Castor is trying to underscore is that Taylor and Kent only have secondhand and thirdhand knowledge of much of this and they’re not able to speak to Trump’s mindset regarding Ukraine and the allegations of election interference.

The Republicans’ defense right now seems to hinge on the idea that Ukraine could plausibly have been responsible for interfering in the 2016 election to help the Democrats. To be clear, this is a conspiracy theory — there is no evidence so far that Ukraine did anything remotely comparable to the Russian election interference described in Mueller’s report. Here’s a good fact-check of several of the strands of this conspiracy theory and why they don’t amount to much.