On Wednesday, the curtain rises on the House’s impeachment show, featuring State Department career diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent as the first witnesses. Mainstream media claim Taylor and Kent have “damning evidence” that President Trump delayed military aid to the Kiev government in a quid pro quo to pressure the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on the Bidens.
Don’t believe it. Kent and Taylor have no evidence against Trump — only a false rumor spread during a farcical game of telephone on Sept. 7. Taylor heard the claim third-hand, and then called Kent, who got it fourth hand.
Making these diplomats lead witnesses in the impeachment show is a ruse. They never spoke with Trump about the aid and admit they had no direct knowledge of why it was delayed. They weren’t even on the controversial July 25 phone call that has become the pretext for impeachment.
On that call, Trump asked Ukraine’s president to investigate meddling in the 2016 US election and Joe Biden’s son’s Ukrainian dealings. Trump didn’t say military aid was contingent on it. But Democrats insist a quid pro quo was implicit. And an impeachable offense.
Now it’s showtime, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has to parade witnesses in front of the cameras to give the appearance that the Democrats have the goods on the president.
What Taylor and Kent heard would never be considered in a court of law. The fact that Schiff’s leading with them indicates he has no real evidence.
Imagine a prosecutor in a murder trial leading with two witnesses who didn’t know anything about the crime but heard a rumor the accused was guilty.
The rumor against Trump gained momentum on Sept. 1, when EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland speculated in a conversation with a Ukrainian official that US aid depended on an investigation.
Six days later, Sondland recounted that conversation to Tim Morrison of the National Security Council, who told Taylor, who then passed it on to Kent, according to page 36 of his earlier testimony.
Here’s Kent’s laughable recap of that game of telephone, from page 267 of his earlier testimony: “Taylor indicated that he had talked to Tim Morrison . . . and Tim had indicated he had talked to Gordon, and Gordon told . . . Tim, and Tim told Bill Taylor that he, Gordon, had talked to the president. . . . And POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go [on] microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton.”
Sondland’s account got muddled as it was passed from Morrison to Taylor to Kent.
Worse, Sondland had no actual knowledge that aid was linked to the Ukrainians announcing an investigation. He merely “presumed” it, he told congressional investigators in a revised statement. And the aid was released without an investigation.
The day after the game of telephone, Sondland talked to Taylor, assuring him that Trump said repeatedly there was no quid pro quo, a fact cited three times, on pages 39, 152 and 244, in Taylor’s testimony. Most media accounts omit that fact. Count on Schiff to gloss over it too on Wednesday.
Also, expect Taylor and Kent to whine endlessly, as they did to investigators, about Trump running foreign policy out of the White House instead of deferring to experts like them. No wonder they’re determined to take Trump down.
But if Schiff wanted real evidence, he’d call Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. When Johnson wanted to find out why the aid was held up, he called Trump directly. Trump explained that he was trying to get European nations to pay their share to arm Ukraine against Russia: “I asked [German Chancellor] Angela [Merkel], ‘You know, why don’t you fund these things? And . . . Angela tells me because you guys will.’ So Ron, we’re schmucks.”
Johnson bluntly asked Trump if that was a quid pro quo for aid, and Trump vehemently replied: “No, I would never do that.”
At the hearings, don’t expect to hear about the abundant evidence exonerating Trump. Schiff’s rigged the hearings to prop up rumors and exclude the truth.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.