Trump’s Committee to Protect the President

Last week’s Republican rallying cry on impeachment was “Hearsay!” By this morning, the focus had turned back to the whistle-blower who started it all.

The consensus GOP retort to the first three public witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry—Ambassadors William Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch, and George Kent, a deputy secretary of state—was that none of them had direct, firsthand knowledge of President Donald Trump’s alleged attempt to condition aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival.

When they arrived at the Capitol this morning, however, Republicans could no longer make that complaint. The witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee—Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council and Jennifer Williams, a special adviser to Vice President