As the impeachment process has ground on, the president’s defense has only become more convoluted and dishonest. A few weeks ago, Trump started telling anyone who’d listen to “read the transcript”; this was considered such an effective line that his supporters literally put it on t-shirts at a rally in Kentucky, even though the “transcript” in question—the White House summary of The Phone Call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president—is both incredibly incriminating and not actually a transcript. We’ve heard that Trump only asked Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and other Democrats because he cares about corruption, an argument that’s often boiled down to the proposition that Trump can’t be a crook because Biden is. (As Catherine Rampell wrote in the Washington Post yesterday, “Just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.”) The president has been the victim of a “Never Trump,” deep-state conspiracy, and was just doing normal foreign policy; in any case, we’re told, Ukraine did get the aid that Trump’s accusers say he tried to wield as a bribe. (A reminder: attempted crimes are still usually crimes.)

Amid this tangle of illogic, one talking point in particular merits dissection from a journalism-adjacent standpoint: the assertion that much of the Democrats’ impeachment case is based on secondhand information, and thus invalid. We first heard this about the whistleblower who initially flagged Trump’s call with Zelensky. (The whistleblower was not on the call, but did base his complaint on accounts from “more than half a dozen US officials” that were “in almost all cases… consistent with one another.”) Last week, “hearsay” was perhaps the most prominent Republican counterattack against the Democrats’ first public witnesses—Bill Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch—none of whom had direct knowledge of Trump’s personal dealings with Ukraine. Last Wednesday, Doug Collins, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, tweeted a clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—“My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night”—and labeled it “a live look into Ambassador Taylor’s testimony.” Trump retweeted it, of course.

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On its merits, the “no firsthand knowledge” line isn’t cleverer—or in better faith—than any of the other lines. If anything, it’s especially craven. Several of the witnesses testifying this week—starting with Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams this morning—do have firsthand knowledge of critical elements of the Ukraine affair. Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union who will testify tomorrow, was centrally involved in it (though he previously has seemed confused about what firsthand knowledge he actually knew). And other figures at the heart of all this—Mick Mulvaney and Rick Perry, for instance—have been blocked from testifying by the White House.

But “no firsthand knowledge” also echoes a broader Trumpian attack. There’s another word for secondhand knowledge: journalism. Not all journalism is secondhand, of course; still, by necessity, reporting which deals with the inner workings of government often is. Nor is all secondhand knowledge journalism: hearsay or gossip is not the same as a carefully corroborated account based on the testimony of several sources. But when it comes to impeachment, Trump boosters are trying to paint the latter as the former—just as they do when they attack diligent reporting as lazy or “fake.” It’s worth noting that some of the language in the whistleblower complaint—that “more than half a dozen US officials” gave accounts that were “consistent with one another”—wouldn’t look out of place in the news pages of the Times or the Post.

To be sure, journalism is different in kind from a series of impeachment hearings in Congress. But there are clear parallels: they both involve getting to the bottom of a matter of public interest by interviewing people with valuable information about it, even if some of those people are at some remove from the facts. And just as impeachment isn’t journalism, it isn’t a rigidly judicial process, either, though Republicans seem desperate to hold it to that standard. Ultimately, we’re discussing whether Trump should be removed as president, not trying to lock him up.

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We shouldn’t treat the secondhand-news talking point as an impeachment-specific deflection; instead, we should recognize it as a building block in this administration’s broader blockade of the truth. The idea that only people with firsthand experience of something can know it happened is dangerous. It’s dishonesty dressed up as empirical rigor, and it further dents trust in interlocutors—from concerned public officials to journalists—whose jobs rely on trust.

Below, more on impeachment:



Other notable stories:

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Update: This post has been updated to clarify that the author of A Warning will “substantially” donate the profits from their book.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.