Impeachment testimony is fourth-hand

Here is the lead NY Times impeachment story from the top of page 1:

Impeachment Hearings Open With Revelation on Trump’s Ukraine Pressure

As public hearings began, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, said he was told President Trump cared more about investigating Joe Biden than he did about Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives opened historic impeachment hearings on Wednesday and took startling new testimony from a senior American diplomat that further implicated President Trump ...

Mr. Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he learned only recently of a July telephone call overheard by one of his aides in which the president was preoccupied with Ukraine’s willingness to say it would look into Mr. Biden and work by his son Hunter Biden for a Ukrainian energy firm. Immediately afterward, Mr. Taylor said, the aide had been informed that Mr. Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine.

A powerful witness for Democrats, Mr. Taylor appeared as Congress embarked on the third set of presidential impeachment hearings in modern times.

Got that? The best evidence is fourth-hand hearsay.

Tayloy said that he had "authority" over the "regular channel" of communications to Ukraine, but was unhappy that Trump had used others for informal communications. Last week, one of Taylor's aides said that he heard Sondland express an opinion in July about Trump cares more about exposing Biden's corruption than advancing the Deep State agenda for reviving the Cold War.

Let's hope so. Some polls have indicated that Joe Biden is the frontrunner to be elected President in 2020. If he is a crook, we need to know that.

Taylor has spent much of his career trying to revive the Cold War by putting troops on the Russian border in order to justify State Dept. budgets. Let's hope that Trump does not care to agree.

But only Trump knows what he cares about. Unless Sondland is a mindreader, he does not know Trump's state of mind. Any such opinion from Sondland is just second-hand hearsay. Taylor's aide is third-hand, and Taylor's testimony is fourth-hand.

If I went to the White House or anywhere else to push for some pet project of him, and didn't get what I wanted, then I might very well grumble that someone cares more about something else. Such grumbling could not possibly be evidence of wrongdoing.

And the pro-impeachment NY Times gushes that this is "startling new testimony"!

This is just a coup by Schiff-Nadler-Schumer, NYTimes-WashPost-CNN, and the Deep State Cold Warriors.

Schiff now claims that he doesn't know who the so-called whistleblower is, even tho Eric Ciaramella's name seems to be known to everyone else, and Schiff is known to have helped him write the complaint.
This will go down as the lamest impeachment attempt in American history.