So what part is “hearsay”? That they did these things with Trump’s knowledge and at his behest? I expect we can fill that part in, but shouldn’t that be the default? Think about how absurd the alternative is.

I don’t think there’s any serious question, even from Republicans, that elevating the demand for investigations to this sort of central role in US/Ukraine relations came from Trump, which would be abusive in itself. So I doubt that’s the part we need direct evidence of.

Then there’s the formal White House visit. It’s frankly just inconceivable that Sondland & co would be telling their counterparts that this eagerly-sought meeting was conditional on investigations without Trump saying so.

GOP reps didn’t say it explicitly, because it’s so laughable once you say it out loud, but that’s the implicit alternative: Sondland was just *ad libbing* preconditions on an important meeting between heads of state that Trump had previously agreed to in principle.

That is not how anything works. Even in this administration. Diplomats do not whimsically impose conditions of their own invention on White House visits. One who did would be fired instantly. But this, too, is an abuse of office for personal benefit.

So the “hearsay” argument has to be very narrowly about whether announcing investigations was just a precondition for the visit, or also what would dislodge the aid. The implied alternative is that Sondland drew the latter inference himself, without Trump explicitly saying so.

Given how Trump operates, that actually seems possible. But that inference is also the only one any sentient being could draw from the conversation Sondland recounts, even if it was the only exchange that led him to conclude aid & visit were both conditional on the announcement.

The “hearsay” dodge is also a way of pretending not to care about aspects of the case that clearly do matter. Trump makes demands all the time—often publicly!—that would be impeachable abuses if subordinates actually acted on them.

Imagine if DOJ actually tried to prosecute Adam Schiff for treason, as Trump has repeatedly called for! Republicans routinely have to fall back on the excuse that even clearly serious direct orders from Trump are OK because nobody carried them out.

If Trump had said “freeze em out until they announce they’re investigating Biden” and nobody had acted on it, does anyone doubt that “nobody acted on it” would be the heart of the Republican defense?

So the majority of today’s testimony that’s not hearsay—what Taylor & Kent directly witnessed—is hugely important. It shows the demand for investigations wasn’t an idle remark, or even an improper demand made on one call, but a priority actually implemented in policy.

This is essentially a shell game strategy: all the focus goes to whatever link in the chain of evidence is absent from any particular testimony. If Trump ordered it, who cares, you can’t prove it was implemented. If it was implemented, who cares you can’t prove the order.

It functions in part on the premise that the audience are goldfish who will forget any fact not being established live on teevee at this moment—and in part on endlessly shifting burdens of proof. A God of the Gaps argument.

“Hearsay” functions here as a sort of burden shifting: It is a way of sneaking in demands for ever more direct proof of inductive steps already amply justified by the available evidence. Like the Tortoise in Lewis Caroll’s dialogue with Achilles, infinitely deferring deduction.

Call it a refutation strategy for goldfish: At the first step of a syllogism from the givens, you object we’re not at the conclusion yet. At the last step to the QED, you question the givens and hope the person you’re trying to fool has a short attention span.

As a side benefit, this strategy tends to obscure that Republicans don’t really have a coherent alternative theory of the case. For every piece of evidence, you can tell a story that fits that one fact that’s an innocent explanation. But the alternatives don’t cohere.

You can tell a story about the aid being held because Trump wanted to press other countries to contribute & had corruption concerns. You can tell a story explaining why nobody at State could get a straight answer about why there was a delay. You can’t tell both stories at once.

For every fact that gets established, there’s some logically possible world where that fact obtains & Trump didn’t act improperly. The question is whether there’s a single such world that fits all the facts better than the alternative explanation.

Which is why the GOP questions felt so scattered. They’re Sam Beckett, not ultimately looking for the leap home, but just the next logicially possible world that accomodates the fact being established right now.

It’s a strategy uniquely adapted for & adaptive in a TV & tweets ecosystem. It rejects the need to construct a sustained argument fitting all facts in favor of a kind of motley assortment of bullet points, each adequate if responsive in a vaccum to the last thing said.

It is probably not actually possible to decisively win an argument with someone deploying this strategy skillfully within the constraints of a TV show or a Twitter thread. You run out of either time or memory.