Faced with damning testimony from Bill Taylor and George Kent, Republicans on Wednesday engaged in increasingly complex intellectual gymnastics in an attempt to defend Donald Trump. As Taylor and Kent, both well-respected diplomats, provided sober, detailed accounts of how the president and Rudy Giuliani pressured Ukraine to announce politically-motivated investigations into Trump’s domestic foes, Devin Nunes and other Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee pushed debunked conspiracy theories, lashed out at the impeachment process, and treated the bombshell testimonies with a yawn.

Nunes was particularly incoherent in his explanation of Trump’s extortion effort, suggesting as he questioned Taylor—a lifelong public servant who on numerous occasions raised concerns that a cadre of officials, at Trump’s direction, were conditioning military aid on probes into Joe Biden and the 2016 election—that the president was justified in seeking the investigations because there were “numerous indications of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election to oppose his campaign and support Hillary Clinton.”

“Once you know that,” Nunes said as he finished questioning Taylor, “it's easy to understand the president's desire to get to the bottom of this corruption and discover exactly what happened in the 2016 election.”

Of course, the notion that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election—not Russia, as United States intelligence concluded—is unfounded, and forms the basis for the very conspiracy theories Trump attempted to get Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate. Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Director of Homeland Security, has called the crackpot narrative “completely debunked,” but he and other officials had been unable to shake the president’s convictions.

Whether Nunes and Co. believe in the conspiracy theory or not, they are apparently hoping it will muddy the waters enough that a cut-and-dry extortion case begins to seem more complicated than it really is. Nunes opened the hearing with a rant suggesting that Democrats were attempting to “smear” Trump after failing to oust him in the Russia investigation; that it was actually Democrats who had colluded with Russia and engaged in shady practices in Ukraine; and that the impeachment inquiry was a little more than “theatrical performance.” “This spectacle is doing great damage to our country,” Nunes said in his opening statement, the cadence of which evoked the man it was meant to defend. “It’s nothing more than an impeachment process in search of a crime.”

But the fact that two associates of Giuliani have already been indicted related to their shady work in Ukraine, and that credible testimony suggests wrongdoing did, in fact, occur, has made Republicans’ defense efforts difficult. Their most effective strategy, it seemed, was to simply ignore what was going on altogether. As Taylor began his testimony, Fox News ran a sidebar implying the career diplomat was biased against Trump and uninformed about what he was testifying on. Then, as committee chair Adam Schiff began questioning Taylor, the network cut to commercial. Trump and his allies seemed to share Fox’s view that two high-ranking officials claiming the president attempted to shakedown a foreign leader was uninteresting. “I don’t know about you but it’s hard for me to stay awake and listen to all this,” Republican Mark Meadows told a scrum of reporters during the hearing Wednesday. “I see they’re using lawyers that are television lawyers,” Trump, who is insisting he is paying no attention to the attempt to impeach him, said. “You know, I’m not surprised to see it because Schiff can’t do his own questions.”

That narrative will certainly do little to blunt House Democrats’ impeachment efforts, but time will tell if they reach beyond their base to impact Americans’ perceptions. It also remains to be seen if the Republicans’ defense gives their Senate counterparts wiggle room to shoot down Trump’s conviction with at least a veneer of integrity. What the first day of public impeachment hearings has made clear is the gulf in seriousness between Trump’s allies and the public servants they’re seeking to undermine. Republicans—including their attorney, Steve Castor—have spent the hearing floating incoherent conspiracy theories; Kent and Taylor, by contrast, have stuck to the (damning) facts.

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