As Donald Trump was wasting millions of dollars today, contributing to climate change by flying to Austin to address his hard core backers, so he can continue lying to, and otherwise deceiving, the American people, his Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, testified truthfully before the House Intelligence Committee, even though Rankling Member Devin Nunes (R-Cal.) wished he had taken either the Fifth Amendment or just stayed in Brussels.
Nunes continued in his rankling project for the rest of the day.
But Amb. Sondland did come, even though former Wichita Tea Party Congressman Mike Pompeo did his best to prevent it, because Pompeo’s State Department baldly refused to let the Ambassador have the notes and other information he needed in order to testify in front of Nunes, God, and the millions watching on television..
We asked our Washington-based associate solitary reporters, Melissa Smith and Keith Coleman, to attend the hearing.
This is what ASRs Smith and Coleman heard Sondland say:
“I am unequivocally bald, and I know in my heart of hearts that Donald Trump is a bald liar, and that if he didn’t have that dumb-looking thing on his head, he would look even worse as a bald guy like me.”
“I know,” Sondland continued, "that Trump and former Tea Party Congressman from South Carolina Mick Mulvaney, his perennially acting Chief of Staff, and RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, and Mitch McConnell, will, very soon, tell me to take the first plane from Brussels to Seattle and forever kiss goodbye to being an Ambassador.”
Trump’s the dude who, today, said, about Sondland, "Let me just tell you: I hardly know the gentleman.”
That, after having praised Sondland — who paid the Trump Inauguration Committee one million smackeroolas to show up outside the west steps of the Capitol on January 20, 2017, so everyone could admire his baldness, and so he could snag the job of Ambassador
to the European Union — an organization that Trump doesn’t like, because he only wants to keep yelling about America Firstism (a really bad idea in today's highly interconnected world) and his dislike for foreign aid.
Trump's remarks have significantly shifted from his complimentary previous comments about Sondland.
In a tweet on October 8, Trump called Sondland "a really good man and a great American."
Sondland today, in the public hearing, amused everyone in the hearing room, including Coleman and Smith, when he said "I remember the first girl I kissed.”
He also said that it was very clear to everyone in Washington that Rudy Giuliani — Trump’s guy to go around, and evade, regular established US government diplomatic channels — was the miscreant pressing him and all the high officials in Ukraine, including its newbie president, Volodymyr Zelensky — to say in front of a microphone and TV cameras that he, Zelensky, would investigate Burisma and also anything that Ukraine did in 2016 with respect to the American presidential election of 2016.
That, a long-since debunked idea, that Ukraine had anything to do with our presidential election, except Ukraine really only wanted a lot of help, because it was Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not Ukraine, that helped Trump get fewer votes on a nationwide basis than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and because Putin is intent on recapturing Ukraine, having already illegally annexed Crimea and because Putin continues his hot war against Zelensky, who was overwhelmingly elected in April, defeating Putin’s close personal friend, Petro Poroshenko, who fled Ukraine and now lives in, guess where, Moscow.
Sondland was very clear that Giuliani should not have been involved in Trump’s effort to force the vulnerable Ukrainians to somehow dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, neither of whom has ever been shown by anyone — especially Trump, Nunes or Fox News — to have done anything wrong.
And later today, top Defense Department official Laura Cooper told Nunes, GOP Attack-Dog-in-Chief Jim Jordan, Chris Stewart (R-Utah, whose really fat male aide sat right behind him without saying a single word), and Trump fave Elise Stefanik (R-NY) that just before Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call with Zelensky, that the Ukrainians really, really wanted to know why Trump was bribing them (https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/20/politics/david-hale-laura-cooper-public-hearing/index.html).
ASRs Smith and Coleman are still in the hearing room, trying their best to ask Nunes why he insists on rankling everybody in the world, including his District in California, only Nunes’ handlers brushed them aside because Nunes knows full well that they work for DNC Chair Tom Perez and this apocryphal newspaper.
Nunes would have done much better today if he had spoken Portugese, the language spoken by his ancestors in the Azores; and we here at AP have not the least doubt that Nunes is just as radically right-wing as Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is the Brazilian counterpart of a certain Donald Trump.