Yes, they have seemed a little fumbly-bumbly in their efforts to defend President Trump at the committee’s impeachment hearings. But in difficult circumstances, the best that can be done sometimes isn’t particularly good. Not when the president outsourced his Ukraine foreign policy to international man of mystery Rudy Giuliani . And when it was widely understood that before President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine could get the White House meeting he desired, Zelensky would have to publicly announce several investigations, the headlines from which would be helpful to Trump’s reelection effort. Or when the Trump administration was seemingly holding up US military aid to increase the pressure.

Some sympathy, please, for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.


Not even a Republican Rumpelstiltskin could spin that soiled straw into gold! Which no doubt explains the effort GOP counsel Steve Castor made to introduce interpretive doubt about Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s assertion that Trump had told him to talk to Giuliani on Ukraine.

Did the president say, “Go talk to Rudy” or “Talk to Rudy,” Castor wanted to know? (Or possibly: “Bro, talk to Rudy”; or: “Whoa, talk to Rudy”; or even: “Oh no, it’s about to snow, talk to Rudy.”)

Poor ranking member Devin Nunes, meanwhile, seemed caught flat-footed by Sondland’s testimony Wednesday that there was such a quid pro quo. He was left to recite a litany of things Trump defenders have cobbled into a grand Ukrainian snipe hunt. Now, give him his props: Nunes can send a wild goose gobbling through the public heather with the best of them. Alas for him, Sondland wasn’t up on the details of this particular diversion. Well, if he were, Nunes said, he’d understand Trump’s suspicions about Ukraine. Whereafter, in a daring gambit, Nunes accused the Democrats of trafficking in conspiracy theories.


Who knows, it might have worked, had not former National Security Council official Fiona Hill come before the committee on Thursday and labeled Nunes’s scenario “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” Who could have anticipated that? Except, perhaps, those who put their faith in US intelligence services rather than Fox News.

GOP counsel Castor went to great pains to get Sondland to say the various requests for a probe hadn’t specifically mentioned the Bidens. That would have been an important victory — if only Trump himself hadn’t pressed for an investigation of the Bidens during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky.

Sondland’s acknowledgment of a quid pro quo made things especially tough for Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has repeatedly declared there wasn’t a quid pro quo. That was already hard to argue, given that Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had previously acknowledged — and then, um, unacknowledged — there was. Sondland’s confirmation only doubled the difficulty Jordan faced.

But oh, the effort he made! Talking at an auctioneer’s pace, Jordan said that since Ukraine had never made the desired statement and since the once-frozen aid was eventually released, nothing had really happened here. Yes, yes, I know: Given that the aid was only released after the whistle-blower filed his complaint, that’s akin to saying if the police interrupt a bank robber before he empties the cash tray into his sack, well, no harm, no foul.


But again, sometimes you don’t have much to work with.

Jordan and others also underscored that allegations that Trump set the terms of the quid pro quo come second hand, not from anyone who had heard it from the president himself.

Alas, there was a downside there, too. Well, reporters later asked, should administration officials who would likely know firsthand — like, say, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Mulvaney — testify?

Jordan did the only thing he could: He ducked.

I mention all this to demonstrate just how difficult it is for a loyal Republican to go about defending the president. So even while conceding the ludicrous, let’s acknowledge how challenging this situation is.

It’s hard to see what else they could have done.

Short of deciding their real duty wasn’t to this president, but rather to the Constitution and the truth, that is.

Correction: An earlier of this column misidentified the Brothers Grimm character.





Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh