All of our memories need refreshing from time to time. However, if you're Gordon Sondland, the former U.S. Envoy For Threadbare Alibis, and a small brigade of your colleagues have come before the Congress to say that your previous testimony was a big bag of bullshit, your memory needs about a month at a spa lest you end up cooling your heels in the federal pokey. And, judging by his most recent deposition, released today by the House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry, ol' Gordon's memory is so refreshed it ought to be climbing Everest any day now.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Quid.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur...

Pro.

...until Ukraine provided...

Quo.

..the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”

Quid pro quo. A Latin phrase that can be translated as, "Game, set, match."

Making the case that all of them are criminals, that they all were involved in an international conspiracy to bribe and/or extort concessions from the government of Ukraine, including that government’s help in ratfcking the 2020 election, in exchange for military aid that Ukraine desperately needs to help fend off the greedy regime in Moscow, of which this administration is a fairly prominent client state, just got easier. Crooks, all of them, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and Rudy Giuliani in particular. Sondland, and former envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, whose testimony also was made public on Tuesday, have laid the rest of the bricks in the wall that now circumscribes everything the president* will do.

He's caught. He knows he's caught. And, for maybe the first time in his life, and certainly for the first time in his presidency*, nobody's going to step up and take the fall. Even Giuliani, eventually, will opt for self-preservation and not dying in prison. If you read the transcripts closely—Nice T-shirts the other night, by the way—you also will see the likes of Mark Meadows floundering and flopping around trying to fit what they're hearing into their previous, spurious narratives. It's like watching goats ice skate. (Devin Nunes, scourge of Internet ruminants, even brings up The Steele Dossier, because that's what good lawn ornaments, too.)

In Gordon Sondland, we see the first guy who doesn't believe serving this president* entails going to jail for him. Now, he will take his refreshed memory home and sleep the sleep of the partially immune.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.