In the afternoon round, the House Intelligence Committee heard from a couple of people who were supposed to be friendly to El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago’s cause in this whole impeachment thing. One was Tim Morrison, a former aide to the National Security Council, and the other was Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine. If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that one important element of the president*’s defense is that Ukraine tried to ratfck him in 2016, and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were in the middle of some kind of corrupt deal in that embattled country. This is one of the things Volker told the committee.

“The accusation that Vice President Biden was acting inappropriately didn’t seem at all credible to me.”

Oops.

This is another thing that Volker said.

“Since these events, and since I gave my testimony on October 3, a great deal of additional information and perspectives have come to light. I have learned many things that I did not know at the time of the events in question.”



Oh, Volker was the pause that refreshes on Tuesday. He spent most of his time reupholstering his previous testimony, and the rest of his time not helping the White House at all. A month ago, for example, Volker told the committee that the topic of investigating the Bidens never came up. On Tuesday, he remembered that Ambassador Gordon Sondland indeed had brought them up. With friends like this, the president* doesn’t need prosecutors.

Morrison and Volker were no great help to Trump’s defense. OLIVIER DOULIERY Getty Images

Morrison and Volker both were damaging in defense. To borrow a useful metric from the NHL, their collective plus/minus was a nightmare. In particular, Volker was as slippery as black ice as he tried to “thread the needle”—his words—between what he said before and what he’s saying at the moment. But he let just enough slip to demolish his utility as any kind of defense witness for the White House. First, he pretty much rendered Rudy Giuliani as a conspiracy-addled fool.

On July 19, Mayor Giuliani raised, and I rejected, the conspiracy theory that VP Biden would have been influenced in his duties as VP by money paid to his son. ... I have known Biden for 24 years. He is an honorable man and I hold him in the highest regard...



Then he explained how opposed he was to blackjacking Ukraine over military aid for the purposes of enlisting that country in the effort to ratfck the 2020 election.



I opposed the hold on U.S. security assistance as soon as I learned about it on July 18, and thought we could turn it around before it the Ukrainians ever knew or became alarmed about it. I did not know the reason for the hold, but I viewed it as a U.S. policy problem.



But the major reveal from Volker’s testimony came when he explained to the committee that, yes, the president* had bought into the insane conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had hacked the 2016 election in an effort to install Hillary Rodham Clinton. The White House had been mouthing this lunacy sotto voce, but here came Volker, called by the Republicans on the committee, to say loudly that the president* was a bit nutty on the subject.



As I previously told this committee, I became aware of the negative impact this was having on our policy efforts when four of us, who were part of the Presidential Delegation to the inauguration, met as a group with President Trump on May 23. We stressed our finding that President Zelenskyy represented the best chance for getting Ukraine out of the mire of corruption it had been in for over 20 years. We urged him to invite President Zelenskyy to the White House.

The President was very skeptical. Given Ukraine’s history of corruption, that is understandable. He said that Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of terrible people. He said they “tried to take me down.” In the course of that conversation, he referenced conversations with Mayor Giuliani. It was clear to me that despite the positive news and recommendations being conveyed by this official delegation about the new President, President Trump had a deeply rooted negative view on Ukraine rooted in the past. He was clearly receiving other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing him to retain this negative view.

I wouldn’t trust Kurt Volker as far as I could throw Konstantin Kilimnik at this point, but he has given nuance and depth to the concept of “they got nothing” that even I didn’t anticipate.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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