"She’s going to go through some things.”

     Well, Day Two of the rolling shit show hurtling toward the cliff is now over so let's get down to business, shall we?
     The biggest development of today's hearing was an hour into Marie Yovanovitch's testimony when Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff stopped the proceedings and read Trump's attack on her in real time. The "president", clearly watching her testimony, couldn't restrain himself any longer and shot out a couple of tweets denigrating her service to the point of blaming her for the other flaming shit show that was Somalia. Fact: Yovanovitch's service in Somalia was when she was a junior foreign service officer at the beginning of her diplomatic career when she was just 27. Blaming her for what would happen in Mogadishu years later takes a serious set of balls I never would've suspected Trump of having considering what a shit show he made of northeastern Syria last month when he abruptly abandoned the Kurds so a genocidal dictator could have his way.
     Trump attacking Yovanovitch and her accomplishments was, I would think, every Hill Republican's worst nightmare. Even the most vociferous of them, especially Jim Jordan (R-No, I'm fucking serious, dude, where's my fucking jacket?!) and Devin Nunes (R-I used to inseminate cows for a living and if you tell people that I'll fucking sue you whether you're a fictional cow or not!). In fact, during today's testimony, Republicans seemed to get the dry heaves at the very thought of attacking the ambassador directly like their boy did so attacked Adam Schiff, instead.
     That means Donald Trump has less restraint than the Republican nut jobs running around the House these days. Let that sink in for a moment.

     I think one of the most shameful things to come out today was Marie Yovanovitch stating she was afraid of what the "president" would tweet about her if she didn't leave Ukraine. That a 33 year veteran diplomat should be scared of what a child molesting mobster and his diseased spawn Don Jr. would say about her on a silly-sounding domain such as Twitter shows just how hollowed out the State Department's been made under this rolling, flaming shit show of an "administration".

     In fact, "hollowed out" was the exact phrase Yovanovich used to describe the empty carcass that used to be the State Department. Because in the course of her forceful testimony, Yovanovich painted a picture in the Ukraine in the final days of its next to last administration in which Giuliani and his now-incarcerated thugs flocked to that country with the intention not of rooting out and eradicating corruption (a story as laughable as Trump's claim that Erdogan "has a great relationship" with Kurds that he's for years regarded as a terrorist threat) but to indulge in it for their personal enrichment.

     She also painted a picture in which she was fearful for her safety such as when Zelensky first got elected president of Ukraine and she was summoned back home urgently by a minor state department official who told her on April 25th to leave on the next plane out. Most chillingly was when Yovanovitch said this summons came when she was honoring an anti-corruption activist named Kateryna Handziuk, who died last November 4th when she succumbed to injuries following a horrific July 31st acid attack.
     Which really is more ironic than it should be in a sane world. Thanks to the whisper campaign against Yovanovitch (Exactly a year before, in April 2018, by his own admission, Lev Parnas personally spoke to Trump about removing her from her post), she was removed not at the pleasure but the displeasure of the "president" simply because she stood in the way of his and Giuliani's out-of-control corruption.
     So when Trump began his predictable tweet storm about Yovanovitch, Chairman Schiff put the brakes to the proceedings and asked her how it made her feel and what she thought Trump's intent was. She flat out said that it would have an intimidating effect on future witnesses. Jim Jordan eventually weighed in on that, stating that Trump didn't engage in any witness tampering because she would've been unaware of it during her testimony were it not for Schiff. Which is the kind of legal reasoning you can expect from a former wrestling coach without a law degree who blithely looked the other way when a team doctor got away with molesting over 1400 wrestlers. Jordan's quasi-legal reasoning seems to be, "If you're not home when your house is being robbed, then it's not being robbed."
     Then, exactly three months after Yovanovitch's ouster, Trump badmouthed her again to Zelensky during the now-infamous July 25th phone call in which he said, “The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news, and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just wanted to let you know that. Well, she’s going to go through some things.” Which is right out of something out of central casting and a hack screenwriter a half a step ahead of delinquent alimony payments.
     Then there was the part when Yovanovitch stated,

I think when we engage in questionable activity, that raises a question. It emboldens those who are corrupt who don’t want to see Ukraine become a democracy, free-market economy, a part of Europe. That is not a security interest.

      Yuri Lutsenko, just one in an seemingly endless line of corrupt Ukrainian Prosecutors General that that country seems to pump out in greater abundance than grain, was part of the corruption scheme and the subsequent smear campaign against her. Lutsenko advanced a conspiracy theory (that he's since recanted) Yovanovitch had given him a list of people she didn't want to have prosecuted. That and she wasn't a big fan of the "president", a charge he's wearisomely flogged going back to Bruce Ohr's wife and certain former FBI officials.
     If Hal Roach had made The Godfather, what you'd have in these proceedings is the final reel. They are the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a pack of rabid right wing assholes that couldn't succeed in making even more corrupt the Ukraine, quite possibly the most corrupt nation in all of Europe.