Fox & Friends held an entire segment with former Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz Thursday in which they parroted President Donald Trump’s dubious defense on impeachment and ignored a crucial detail that completely undermines it.

Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday and asserted that the president — and several of his more prominent allies — were engaged in a quid pro quo scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce investigations into his political rivals. While the ambassador to the European Union said Trump never “directly” told him U.S. military aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the investigations he wanted, Sondland said it was “abundantly clear” to everyone involved that there was a quid pro quo. “Everyone was in the loop,” he notably said, multiple times

In the fallout from Sondland’s testimony, President Trump and his defenders have latched onto Sondland’s account of his September phone call with Trump, in which Trump said “I want nothing” while discussing Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan, namely, criticized Sondland for not including that crucial detail in his opening statement.

Trump repeatedly pushed the point hard yesterday at a press spray during Sondaland’s testimony, claiming “IT’S OVER” in a nakedly ambitious and preemptive attempt to claim victory in a process that is far from over.

But even if one ignores the bulk of the quid pro quo testimony provided by Sondland and others, it’s crucial to note the timeline: The Trump-Sondland call in September happened after the whistleblower raised the alarm on Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign.

September 9, the date of the call, also happens to be the date that the House Intelligence Committee first learned about the complaint.

That’s right. Trump’s “I want nothing” statement — supposedly the denial that exonerates him — was made after he was caught pressuring Ukraine to announce politically advantageous investigations.

Did any of this come up in Fox & Friends’ conversation with Chaffetz? No. Instead, the focus was on how Sondland “presumed” there was a quid pro quo since the president ordered him and others to work with Rudy Giuliani to go after his rivals.

“The president takes the call, being highly accessible and has his finger on the pulse, and tells him exactly what he wants to do: no quid pro quo, just do his job, make the best decision he possibly can,” Chaffetz said. “That should be the end of this entire inquiry based on that testimony right there. There is nothing else to this, all this other thing is just clutter and noise. What the president said directly is what the president should be held accountable for.”

The Fox & Friends segment continued with the ensemble hammering Sondland for not including Trump’s “I want nothing” comments in his opening statement. The discussion emerged as an acceptance of Trump’s quid pro quo denial, given Sondland’s testimony that he was never told in explicit terms what the Ukraine pressure campaign was.

“I don’t know how he still has a job,” Chaffetz said about Sondland. “When the president gives you a directive and then you start spreading out things that are not true that are in contradiction of what the president said.”

“I think the Democrats are swimming upstream, and they don’t have facts on their side.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

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