Today’s headlines are echoes of Watergate after John Dean’s dramatic testimony. From the New York Times: News, Sondland Says He Followed Trump’s Orders to Pressure Ukraine. Analysis, In an Echo of Watergate and John Dean, an Adviser Points to Trump. The Times editorializes, Sondland Has Implicated the President and His Top Men. From the Washington … Read more
Continuing with today’s theme, Ian Millhiser writes at Vox, Gordon Sondland is being called the next John Dean. Here’s why. Forty-six years ago, President Nixon’s former White House counsel took an oath before a congressional committee and delivered testimony that eventually brought down the president. On Wednesday, not long after Gordon Sondland, President Trump’s ambassador … Read more
Well, not quite John Dean. John Dean had a photographic memory and laid out incredibly detailed riveting testimony from his memory of events, later remarkably verified in the Nixon tapes. Ambassador Gordon Sondland concedes that his memory is not that good without access to reference to documents and readouts of conversations, which he says the … Read more
Former U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s former senior director covering Russia and Ukraine, and previously a longtime Republican congressional staffer, were called to testify by Republicans. They were supposed to be their star witnesses. Instead, these witnesses blew up the conspiracy theories being propagated by Republicans in … Read more
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee would have you believe the Ukraine scandal was just one phone call on July 25, the call that prompted the whistleblower complaint, and despite the inspector general of the intelligence community finding that complaint an “urgent matter of concern,” Republicans do not find anything in the call readout to … Read more