In a 1994 episode of “The Simpsons,” a character complains that Sideshow Bob shouldn’t be in prison for attempted murder, rhetorically asking, “Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?”
A former writer of the show said Republicans use the same defense for Trump when they argue that even if he did seek a quid pro quo with Ukraine, there was no wrongdoing because it was unsuccessful.
A second U.S. Embassy staffer in Kyiv overheard a cellphone call between President Donald Trump and his ambassador to the European Union discussing a need for Ukrainian officials to pursue “investigations,” The Associated Press has learned.
The July 26 call between Trump and Gordon Sondland was first described during testimony Wednesday by William B. Taylor Jr., the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Taylor said one of his staffers overhead the call while Sondland was in a Kyiv restaurant the day after Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that triggered the House impeachment inquiry.
The second diplomatic staffer also at the table was Suriya Jayanti, a foreign service officer based in Kyiv. A person briefed on what Jayanti overheard spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter currently under investigation.
Trump on Wednesday said he did not recall the July 26 call.
“No, not at all, not even a little bit,” Trump said.
The White House did not respond to questions Thursday about the second witness to the call with Sondland.
The staffer Taylor testified about is David Holmes, the political counselor at the embassy in Kyiv, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Holmes is scheduled to testify Friday before House investigators in a closed session.
Taylor was one of the first witnesses called Wednesday during the impeachment inquiry’s initial open hearing. He testified that his staffer could hear Trump on the phone asking Sondland about “the investigations.”
The accounts of Holmes and Jayanti could tie Trump closer to alleged efforts to hold up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings. …
Link courtesy currentstatus.io.
Yes! Pelosi is shifting the terminology from “quid pro quo” to “bribery.” I’ll bet she had this planned all along – just waiting until the public hearings. 
Now the media will surely follow suit. 
Speaker Nancy Pelosi sharpened the focus of Democrats’ impeachment case against President Trump on Thursday, accusing the president of committing bribery when he withheld vital military assistance from Ukraine at the same time he was seeking its commitment to publicly investigate his political rivals.
The speaker’s explicit allegation of bribery, a misdeed identified in the Constitution as an impeachable offense, was significant. Even as Ms. Pelosi said that no final decision had been made on whether to impeach Mr. Trump, it suggested that Democrats are increasingly working to put a name to the president’s alleged wrongdoing, and moving toward a more specific set of charges that could be codified in articles of impeachment in the coming weeks.
“The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery uncovered in the inquiry, and that the president abused his power and violated his oath by threatening to withhold military aid and a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation into his political rival — a clear attempt by the president to give himself an advantage in the 2020 election,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference in the Capitol.
Democrats have begun using the term “bribery” more freely in recent days to describe what a string of diplomats and career Trump administration officials have said was a highly unusual and inappropriate effort by Mr. Trump and a small group around him to extract a public promise from Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a discredited theory about Democrats conspiring with Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 election.
Is anybody here wondering who ELSE overheard all of this, given how lax they were with security?
And there you have it!
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s cell phone call to President Donald Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine this summer appears to be a shocking security breach that raises significant counterintelligence concerns, according to several former officials, who told CNN there is a high probability that intelligence agencies from numerous foreign countries, including Russia, were listening in on the conversation.
“If true, the cell phone call between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump is an egregious violation of traditional counterintelligence practices that all national security officials – to include political appointee ambassadors such as Sondland – are repeatedly made aware of,” according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before retiring this summer.
"I cannot remember in my career any time where an ambassador in a high counterintelligence environment like Kiev would have such an unsecure conversation with a sitting president. This just should not happen," he said.
Imagine the power of this kompromat. If the President is heard confirming his bribery scheme, releasing this tape could literally remove him from office.
Cross-post 
Remember the old saying: “there’s no honor among thieves.”
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, in response to a question about whether he was nervous that Trump might “throw him under a bus” in the impeachment crisis, Giuliani said, with a slight laugh: “I’m not, but I do have very, very good insurance, so if he does, all my hospital bills will be paid.”
Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, who was also on the call, then interjected: “He’s joking.”
Note to self:
09/22/19 President Trump Departure Remarks
7:22 Starts on Biden and Ukraine (no featured clip of the whole thing, only bites?)
Featured clip: Trump describes conversation with Ukraine President
Transcript
Breaking…someone new to testify!
So they have someone from OMB to testify - Mark Sandy, and he’s someone who ostensibly signs the checks for OMB…like to Ukraine. He’s a career guy, not appointed.
A longtime career employee at the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to break ranks and testify Saturday in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, potentially filling in important details on the holdup of military aid to Ukraine.
Mark Sandy would be the first OMB employee to testify in the inquiry, after OMB acting director Russell T. Vought and two other political appointees at the agency defied congressional subpoenas to appear. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and ordered administration officials not to participate.
Unlike these other OMB officials, Sandy is a career employee, not one appointed by the president. He has worked at the agency off and on for over a decade, under presidents of both parties, climbing the ranks to his current role as deputy associate director for national security programs.
Ambassador Gordon Sondland persists, despite the fact that T now says he hardly knew him, and he was widely criticized by his peers. He will not step down which would be an indicator that he’s done something wrong.
One wonders how Sondland is going to handle his day in front of the Impeachment panel with new revelations about an overheard call, now confirmed by two government workers.
The Dems know that Ambassador Sondland does not have the best credibility considering his changeroo on his testimony…a quick addendum, because he mis-remembered the facts, as detailed by other’s testimony. 
I hope he brings with him some humility and some truth. One can only hope.
Sondland’s refusal to step down also comes after his current and former colleagues heavily criticized his actions under sworn deposition.
Vindman said he “tended to go off script” and was “not a professional diplomat.” Former White House official Fiona Hill called him a walking “counterintelligence risk” and “target for foreign powers.” She said Sondland “frequently” gave foreign officials her cellphone number to “call up and demand meetings.”
“We had all kinds of officials from Europe . . . literally appearing at the gates of the White House,” Hill said. “He was . . . giving out his phone number and texting [regional officials]. . . . All of those communications could have been exfiltrated by the Russians very easily.”
Hill testified that Sondland had good intentions but that in terms of policy, “he’d just gone off the road. No guardrails, no GPS.”
Sondland’s isolation continues even inside the U.S. mission in Brussels, where some career diplomats said they had been appalled by his leadership.
Buckle up…here co es Ex-ambassador Yovanovitch’s truth telling…
As a leading female diplomat, a political target of the president’s allies and a figure at the center of the Ukraine drama, Yovanovitch has crucial knowledge to impart when she testifies at Friday’s impeachment hearing. She also enters the spotlight as the latest woman who has refused to acquiesce to Trump in the face of personal and gender-specific attacks.
Commentary from NYT Live Impeachment coverage…
You might ask…why is Nunes bringing up all these conspiratorial tidbits, ie - nude photos…Maggie Haberman has an explainer, or whether Rep Schiff, or Dems had met the whistleblower.
Maggie Haberman
White House Correspondent
You might have asked yourself what you just heard when Nunes said something about “nude photos.” Our colleague Charlie Savage wrote the other day: “It’s a reference to a prank call to Schiff by a Russian radio show in which someone pretending to be a Ukrainian government official told him that Russian president Vladimir Putin was blackmailing Trump with naked photos taken during an affair between the president and a Russian model. Schiff told the prankster to send his materials to the FBI and the intelligence committee.”
Julian Barnes
Intel Reporter
Nunes was just asking about how much the Democrats coordinated with whistleblower. Our reporting is that the future whistleblower met with a member of Schiff’s staff, who referred him to the inspector general. Schiff’s staff only got a vague outline of the accusations.
The real reason Republicans rammed immoral, unfit Steven Menashi through the Senate: this flips the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to a majority of GOP appointees.
The 2nd covers New York & is the court that will decide Trump subpoena cases.
Trump told Speaker Pelosi, the most powerful person in the House of Representatives, to go home and clean today. He made similar attacks against Marie Yovanovitch. The misogyny is always there for him.
Trump live tweeted the earlier call this morning.
It even explicitly states this is just a memo, though.
Journalists are now noting how in the July call Ukrainian President Zelensky thanked Trump for being the first person to warn him about Ambassador Yovanovitch… and there is no mention of that OR corruption in the memo Trump released this morning.
On the second day of open testimony in the impeachment inquiry, the House Intelligence Committee heard from former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Featured clips:
During impeachment inquiry testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is asked by Committee Chair to respond to real-time criticism from President Trump on Twitter. “I don’t think I have that kind of power,” Yovanovitch says in response to the president’s charge that everywhere she went, “turned bad.” Asked what the effect of such attacks are, Yovanovitch says that she can’t speak to the president’s intent here, but adds that “the effect is to be intimidating.”
Former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch describes the moment when she first read the summary of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky, in which President Trump described her as “bad news” and that she would “go through some things.” “I was shocked and devastated that I would feature in a phone call between two heads of state in such a manner,” she says. Ambassador Yovanovitch says she also had a physical reaction at the time and that the color drained from her face upon reading the call memo.
Cross-posting
Questions from R lawyer Castor to Yovanovitch…they go low. Natch.
