Anytime a story about some new scandal with the Trump administration breaks, it’s best to wait a few hours before forming any opinion. Once the initial smoke clears, every single time, it turns out to be not what we were originally told.

Former Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor’s “explosive” written congressional testimony is precisely one of those times.

That story broke Tuesday and the hysterical coverage that followed went something like this: My God, this proves the ‘quid pro quo’ and that Trump wanted Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election!

Per usual, that wasn’t the case. You have to actually read the insanely long and complicated testimony yourself to get to the truth, which is that Taylor was, first, nearly in tears about making sure that Ukraine got millions in aid with no strings attached, and second, in disagreement with the White House about what exactly the Ukraine-U.S. relationship should be.

For point one, yes, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, presumably at the direction of the president, held up the military money allocated to Ukraine. I know that it’s been ingrained in the minds of Americans that funding to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars is simply supposed to flow unabated to other countries like cheap wine. But that’s not the way it has to work. It’s not out of the question for us to, at the very least, ask that the recipients show some gratitude, or even acknowledge that we don’t have to give them anything at all. The United States is the world's most charitable nation but we’re not a charity.

That leads to point two. Taylor testified that Tim Morrison of the White House National Security Council told Taylor that Trump “doesn't want to provide any assistance at all” to Ukraine. Taylor without a doubt had some kind of emotional breakdown at the thought. He further describes different conversations with different administration officials, who told him that Trump wanted the new president of Ukraine to commit to rooting out any corruption in the country and to investigate any role that its government had in influencing the 2016 election. Trump also hoped that the new president would publicly state those intentions, perhaps in an interview with CNN.

The national media have shown virtually no interest in why Trump would have wanted any of this, outside of the insistence that he must have been pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, thus hurting him in the lead up to the 2020 election.

In his testimony, Taylor endorsed that speculation based on nothing outside of his own assumption. He admits in the testimony that, like everyone else, he never heard Biden’s name mentioned until the White House itself released the transcript of Trump’s mid-summer call with the head of Ukraine. The transcript of the call shows that Trump asked that the Ukraine to look into the energy company Burisma, which Biden’s son had been on the board for and which had already been under investigation in the recent past. Trump also asked that Ukraine look into its own influence in the 2016 election.

Reporters have rushed to call that last request by Trump as nothing more than a preoccupation with a “debunked conspiracy theory” because they don’t want anyone remembering Ukraine’s explicit interference in the 2016 election. Even the far-left Nation magazine ran a piece late last month calling for more scrutiny of exactly what Ukraine did and why.

In summer 2016, Ukraine’s government identified Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, as a recipient of millions of dollars in payments from one of the country’s political parties that had sympathies with Russia. That led to the ousting of Manafort from Trump’s campaign and played a key role in the debunked conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian agent.

By the way, Manafort, the former head of a major presidential candidate’s campaign, is now in prison. How’s that for foreign interference in an election?

Taylor’s contention was that the aid for his precious Ukraine had been held up for any reason at all. In the end, the aid was released, there was never any public statement by the head of Ukraine about the investigations and, eventually, the transcript of that now notorious call was released for the public to see for itself what it was that Trump wanted to know.

So what did we learn from Taylor’s testimony? Outside of the fact that he really loves Ukraine, nothing.

That’s how “explosive” the story about him on Tuesday was.