If it was a Perfect Call, and all that President Trump cared about was rooting out corruption in Ukraine, surely the people involved can testify before Congress under oath. Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani—these guys are in a perfect position to clear all this up! They can take the oath and proceed to recite all the ways in which Donald Trump is an international anti-corruption crusader, a transatlantic swamp-drainer, and they were merely carrying out his orders in that capacity. All those orders they received were in the American public interest, because this president puts America First and never his personal financial or political interests. Just say it under oath, boys! That's what the parade of career civil servants who testified in the House investigation did. Except they said the opposite.

Oh, yeah. That's right. There are a lot of people weighing in—and/or yelling—about what the president did or didn't do with respect to Ukraine, but only some of them have testified under penalty of perjury. The ones who could go to jail for lying all testified that the president subverted American foreign policy for his personal gain when he attempted to extort a foreign government until it agreed to attack free and fair American elections in 2020. The ones who deny all that will only do so on Fox News. We got another example of that on Monday evening, when Rudy Giuliani joined Laura "Summer Camps" Ingraham to smear the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. If you're keeping score at home, Yovanovitch is one of those who testified under oath. Giuliani is not.

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Giuliani spreads sketchily-sourced smears of Yovanovitch: "I forced her out because she's corrupt. I came back with a document that will show unequivocally that she committed perjury ... she should have been fired if the State Department weren't part of the deep state." pic.twitter.com/kQ13OOJvmy — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 17, 2019

Ingraham dismissed the New Yorker interview where Giuliani incriminated himself as a "hit piece," but to her credit, she did bring up the moment where he self-owned.

[Giuliani], too, saw Yovanovitch as an obstacle, hindering his attempt to dig up dirt against his client’s rival in advance of the 2020 election. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” he said. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

So the president's personal lawyer has admitted he engineered the ousting of a career civil servant—with a "dossier" of unverified information, no less—because she would not play ball when he tried to do some domestic ratfucking on foreign shores. It seems even Giuliani now realizes it was a mistake to say this outright, however, so he hastily told Ingraham that Yovanovitch was "corrupt." His evidence is apparently some double-secret document he won't show now, but which is definitely real and accurate, like all the other information he's brought out of Ukraine. Why doesn't he submit these documents to Congress? He just wants to get to the bottom of this! He's got a document and four witnesses! He's a lawman!

Not content to spew some evidence-free smears, however, Giuliani proceeded to go straight through the looking glass into the Wonderful World of InfoWars.

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The president's lawyer was on national TV last night pushing Infowars-style conspiracy theories. pic.twitter.com/NPvDf59taO — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 17, 2019

There is no reason to believe anything Giuliani says because he has proven himself to have and will not provide any actual evidence for his claims. (Saying you have evidence without providing it is not the same as having evidence.) But the real kicker is the reference to George Soros, an invitation for the paranoid minds watching to drift into conspiracies about globalist cabals and shadowy plots. Just to clarify, "NGO" means "non-governmental organization." The name says very little about what each group's actual purpose is, and Giuliani does not get into specifics—which is, of course, the point.

The president is maintaining his allegiance to Giuliani for now, calling him "probably the greatest crime fighter over the last 50 years." At some point on this temporal plane, however, Trump will probably claim to have never met him. He will probably be underbussed like all those who came before, and whose liability came to outweigh their usefulness. The truly astounding thing is that these guys still go to work for El Jefe having seen how much he values his employees. At some point, if they don't get off the ride in time, he'll probably unbuckle them and send them flying off at a hairpin turn.

In the meantime, they are mostly doing his bidding. John Bolton has made a little public noise, but seems to have prioritized giving speeches and writing a book. The others are toeing the line, spewing nonsense on cable news and following the president's order not to testify before Congress. That's the essential Catch-22 that congressional Republicans are operating on: we haven't heard from enough Fact Witnesses, but it's their allies in the White House who are blocking the remaining Fact Witnesses from testifying. And yet we're supposed to believe that these guys who refuse to testify under oath are the ones telling the truth, while the folks who did tell their stories under penalty of perjury are lying.

The easiest way to get to the bottom of it is for all of those involved to testify. Giuliani has been a key player in this from the beginning. The Senate should hear from him during the impeachment trial, and Republicans could make that happen. Unless, of course, they don't truly believe Donald Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Eastern Europe.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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