After three days of congressional hearings, only one witness has emerged so far with a legitimate gripe, and it has nothing to do with the substance of the impeachment pursuit of President Trump.
No, I’m not talking about Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who may have broken wind on national TV.
Former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was memorable for the hurt she felt about being the target of rumors and unproven allegations spread by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
“What I’d like to say is while I obviously don’t dispute that the president has the right to withdraw an ambassador at any time for any reason,” Yovanovitch said last week, “but what I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation.”
Good question, and right now, it doesn’t have a clear answer. We haven’t heard from the person responsible — Giuliani. Maybe we never will, at least not under oath in a hearing.
But although Yovanovitch has every reason to be resentful over being mistreated, we’re left with nothing now but testimonies from several career bureaucrats about how they disagreed with the president’s approach in dealing with a foreign leader. Whenever they are elected president of the United States, they can determine how their administrations operate on the international scale. Until then, it’s not really up to any one of them how things go in that department. Trump gets to make the decisions.
We know that Trump had reasonable suspicions about Ukraine, due to the country having inserted itself into the 2016 election for the benefit of Hillary Clinton.
Kurt Volker, another State Department representative to Ukraine, testified that Trump told him in conversation that Ukraine “tried to take me down.” That’s true. And when asked during the hearing whether Trump’s enduring suspicion of Ukraine was a “reasonable position,” Volker said that yes, it was. That’s also true.
OK, so if Trump was reasonably resentful and skeptical of a notoriously corrupt country such as Ukraine, so much so that he wanted to talk with its new president before releasing military aid and agreeing to a White House meeting, why are we even debating this anymore?
Yovanovitch got muddied up in this ridiculous controversy, and she has a right to feel bitter about it. Who wouldn’t? But beyond that, three days of testimony have yet to prove that anything was so wrong as to justify unseating a president, let alone doing so less than a year before he’s up for reelection.
