(CNN) Bill Taylor was everything Democrats hoped he would be. And everything Republicans feared he might be.

Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, was credible, serious, frank and deeply specific during his day-long testimony on Capitol Hill about his concerns regarding President Donald Trump's behavior toward top Ukrainian officials.

Taylor's opening statement , which spanned better than a half hour, was a tour de force of damaging details for the President -- culminating in a new revelation that an aide had overheard US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on the phone with the President on July 26 making clear that the Ukrainians were prepared to play ball. And that, when asked about Trump's views on Ukraine, Sondland had told the aide that the President was primarily focused on getting investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden started.

Democrats, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (California) largely just used their question time to allow Taylor to confirm and/or restate the timeline of events he laid out in scrupulous detail in his opening statement. How he first heard of the hold put on more than $400 million in US aid to Ukraine. How he realized that an "irregular" diplomatic channel -- led by Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani -- had been opened up with Ukraine. How it became increasingly clear to him that Trump and those close to the President were seeking to leverage the political power of the United States to pressure a foreign country to dig up dirt on a possible 2020 rival.

Republicans on the committee did their best to disrupt the momentum that Taylor's opening statement had created by noting that all of his concerns were based on things conveyed to him second- and third-hand, and that because nothing ever came of these asks from Trump -- and Ukraine got the aid anyway -- that this was all a big nothingburger.

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