Follow the Testimony

Susan B. Glasser, in The New Yorker:

Kent, Sondland, and Yovanovitch remain U.S. government officials, and could be fired. Both Kent and Yovanovitch ... have given decades of service to their country at the State Department. This is bravery of a sort that has become so rare in our public life as to be almost unimaginable.

Trump himself, in other words, was putting together a rogue foreign-policy team, run by Giuliani, the President’s private attorney, that would go outside normal N.S.C. and State Department channels to pressure Ukraine.

The ... outlines ... have been known since the start ... but the testimony by Hill and others ... shows how much the President was directly implicated... The scandal, as this week showed, is about a lot more than saying “do us a favor though” in a phone call.

Hill’s decision to appear on Monday, in defiance of White House demands, was crucial.

... there is nothing the White House can do to retract the sworn statements of its officials who are now coöperating with the impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.

Trump has been staffing his cabinet with "temporary" and "acting" officials who haven't been vetted by Congress. He has been hollowing out federal agencies and replacing career bureaucrats with people loyal to himself, rather than to our Constitution. These changes have made it easier to violate the law in secret (Giuliani and Mulvaney notwithstanding). Other changes, like the near elimination of press briefings, have made it harder to ask even informal questions about the actions of Team Trump. Its refusal to cooperate with Congressional inquiries has been a brazen attempt to avoid all accountability. Sarah Kendzior seems to have understood this administration from the start.

I studied dictatorships and authoritarian regimes the entire time I was doing my PhD.... A lot of things that Trump was doing in his campaign reminded me of things I saw in Uzbekistan, Russia, and other authoritarian states around the world.

Thank goodness the House of Representatives began to fulfill its duty re impeachment before the executive was completely gutted. Thank goodness Trump and his toadies are so inept. Where might we be now if they were actually skilled? Added bonus: Vanity Fair