Trump's terrible Yovanovitch tweet wasn't the 'witness intimidation' voters care about

Keen to undermine House Republicans's entire impeachment strategy, President Trump took to Twitter to attack Marie Yovanovitch for not single-handedly saving Somalia, a failed state in its third decade of civil war, and Ukraine, from which he expunged her. Crucially, he did this as Yovanovitch was publicly testifying to the House Intelligence Committee as a part of the impeachment proceedings against Trump.

There's no question that Trump's personal advisers and attorneys ought to lock his phone in a vault for the duration of the impeachment proceedings, if not for the rest of his presidency. But contrary to Chairman Adam Schiff's assertions, Trump's tacky tweets don't constitute witness intimidation, not by any true legal standard and certainly not by any metric the public cares about.