Donald Trump’s Gordon Problem

Republicans tried to throw Gordon Sondland under the bus. He took Trump with him.

Over the first three days of testimony in the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, Republicans have tried out a number of defenses. After the Wednesday testimony of Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, almost all of them have been incinerated.

Throughout the proceedings, Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has glowered, sneered and repeated some of the same conspiracy theories that Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, wanted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to substantiate.

Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican recently added to the Intelligence Committee because he’s seen as an effective advocate for Trump, has argued that Trump was genuinely concerned about corruption in Ukraine, and was induced to release frozen aid after Ukraine’s Parliament passed reform measures.

Others have repeated the refrain of “no quid pro quo.” Some have tried to dismiss the claims against Trump as mere hearsay. A few have suggested that Sondland and Giuliani were working on their own.

Nunes’s already phantasmagorical case was further undermined on Tuesday, when Republicans called Kurt Volker, Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine, to testify. Volker called allegations that, as vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine for personal reasons “self-serving and not credible” and accused Giuliani of spreading a “conspiracy theory.”