He was straight out of Foggy Bottom central casting.
Lean and bespectacled, with neatly combed gray hair and a pressed charcoal suit, William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, gave not so much as a glance toward the massed cameras as he arrived Tuesday, escorted by uniformed police, at the offices of the House Intelligence Committee. With steady gait and grim countenance, he disappeared behind a basement door marked “Restricted Area.”
But once inside, he delivered words that could end a presidency.
“In August and September of this year, I became increasingly concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular informal channel of U.S. policy-making and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons,” Taylor testified, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. Taylor said President Trump himself made the release of military aid to Ukraine contingent on a public declaration by Ukraine’s president that the country would investigate Joe and Hunter Biden and the 2016 election.
In an instant, the impeachment inquiry no longer rested on the credibility or motives of a whistleblower, nor arguments about the meaning of quid pro quo. Here, spelling out Trump’s wrongdoing in extensive detail, was the diplomat Trump’s team brought out of retirement to be the ambassador to Ukraine — replacing the woman Trump ousted from that position at the request of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Taylor, an Army veteran and a respected diplomat who obviously kept detailed notes, will not be easy to discredit.
Trump, more than anybody, must have known how damaging Taylor’s testimony would be. Ninety minutes before Taylor was slated to arrive, Trump created a diversion. He tweeted to his 66 million followers: “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching.”
