The stakes get much higher today

| 9:09 am EST November 15, 2019
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Wednesday’s opening round of televised House impeachment hearings was a clear but low-key win for House Democrats, because they designed it that way. Adam Schiff started things off with his two least-controversial witnesses, in order to establish credibility for the hearings from the outset. Now that the groundwork for Donald Trump’s Ukraine bribery scandal has been laid out by Bill Taylor and George Kent, we’re about to see the stakes get much higher today.

Taylor and Kent have already vouched for Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, and they’ve already spelled out Donald Trump’s corrupt motivation for firing her. Now, today, we’re going to hear from Yovanovitch herself. It was wise of Schiff not to start off with a witness who was fired by Trump, and who could therefore be painted as having an axe to grind. The entire purpose of Wednesday’s hearing was to help make sure that Yovanovitch gets believed today by the average nonpartisan American who’s tuning in and doesn’t know much detail about the scandal, because the stories she’s going to tell today are going to be equal parts incriminating and bonkers.

Marie Yovanovitch will use her testimony to spell out that Donald Trump fired her so that he and Rudy Giuliani could carry out their corrupt bribery scheme in Ukraine. Yovanovitch will also testify that after she was fired, she was advised by the Trump regime to leave Ukraine immediately, with the implied threat that her safety would be placed in danger if she didn’t get on the first flight home. You can see why it’s so important that the average viewer finds her testimony credible, and why today’s hearing has such higher stakes than Wednesday’s hearing had.

Of course next week the stakes will get even higher, as Fiona Hill testifies about how she witnessed Gordon Sondland carrying out the Ukraine extortion scheme in the White House, and then Sondland himself testifies that he was doing it all at Donald Trump’s instruction. But today’s testimony from Marie Yovanovitch is crucial, because it’ll help establish that Trump and Giuliani were so eager to carry out a criminal plot in Ukraine, they fired the U.S. Ambassador just so she couldn’t stand in the way of their crime spree.