To say that this week in Impeachment Hearings was no good, very bad, horrible, terrible for Donald Trump and his chief defender in the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, would be an understatement. Witness after witness, in public, destroyed Republican excuses for Donald Trump’s crimes one at a time.
Chairman Adam Schiff’s leadership of these hearings in the House Intelligence Committee has been a master class in dealing with petulant children, and Republicans, frustrated with their own failure to be able to land a single strike, have gone after the chairman personally. They accused him - without evidence - of knowing who the whistleblower is, and even of being a ‘fact witness’ in the inquiry because of his supposed conspiracy to bring down the president. He was in league with Ukrainian sources to bring down Trump, charged Devin Nunes, also of California, the Republican ranking member of the committee.
To the dismay of Nunes and the Republicans, though, every Democrat on the committee on every day of the hearings came prepared with devastating answers to the Republican attacks. Today, another California Democrat on the committee, Eric Swalwell came to slay Nunes.
Swallwell moved swiftly and methodically to make the case that Nunes and his associates are knee-deep in Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy and crime.
When it was Swalwell’s turn to question today’s witnesses - Dr. Fiona Hill, former director of Eurasia at the National Security Council and diplomat David Holmes from the US Embassy in Ukraine, Swalwell gunned straight for Nunes. He asked Dr. Hill if she heard of anyone named named ‘Kash', who Trump had thought was the “Ukraine Director” at the NSC. Hill had.
This ‘Kash' is, in reality, Kash Patel, who now works at the National Security Council but was on the staff of Devin Nunes in 2017 and 2018. Republicans were in the majority in the House then, and Nunes was the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. According to reporting in Politico, it was Patel that fed Trump the Ukrainian conspiracy theories.
But that was just the soft blow. After that, Swalwell went for the knockout.
He put into the Congressional record a report in the Daily Beast, which states the indicted Lev Parnas, associate of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a purveyer of Ukrainian conspiracy theories, worked with Nunes in his “investigations.” Then, Swalwell read the first two paragraphs of the article, just to rub it in.
Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Rep. Devin Nunes in 2018, Parnas’ lawyer Ed MacMahon told The Daily Beast.
Nunes aide Derek Harvey participated in the meetings, the lawyer said, which were arranged to help Nunes’ investigative work. MacMahon didn’t specify what those investigations entailed.
Swalwell went on to charge Nunes with projection, and suggested that perhaps Nunes should take the stand as a fact witness, not Chairman Schiff. Nunes said nothing, but his face did all the talking.
Watch the full questioning from Rep. Swalwell:
It is now clear that the Republicans are not merely trying to protect Trump’s crimes, they are trying to shield against their own.
From the start of the hearings on Tuesday with Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, among others, and concluding today with Hill and Holmes, this phase of the impeachment inquiry has been devastating for Republicans. US Ambassador to the EU, Godon Sondland, on Wednesday, plainly testified that there was an explicit quid pro quo required for the official act of a White House meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky would need to publicly announce - but would not need to actually conduct - a fake investigation into the family of former Vice President Joe Biden. Sondland and others came to quickly understand that Congressionally approved foreign aid would not be released without such a public statement, either.
Through it all, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have been embarrassing themselves by throwing everything at the wall. They have tried to disrupt the proceedings, only to have met with the steel nerve and resolution of Chairman Schiff (D-CA). They’ve tried to say that Ukraine did too interfere in the 2016 elections, a conspiracy theory that has long been outright rejected by the US intelligence community, and Dr. Hill today decimated as a “fictional narrative that has been propagated and perpetrated by Russia."
And today, Eric Swalwell proved that the Ukrainian conspiracy theories were literally cooked up by criminals and crooks working for Devin Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump.
Game. Over.