Hearsay. You know why it’s not admissible? Because it’s not reliable. There’s no direct thread from the event to the witness stand. It’s a chain with a broken link. But hearsay is exactly what the so-called whistleblower complaint that kicked off the newest “end of the Trump presidency” scandal.
And that amazing fact was revealed, probably accidentally, in a report by CNN of all places. Via The Blaze:
The whistleblower didn’t have direct knowledge of the communications, an official briefed on the matter told CNN. Instead, the whistleblower’s concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work, and those details have played a role in the administration’s determination that the complaint didn’t fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law, the official said.
The question in all this is about whether the President used the office to pressure a foreign nation to help him hurt a potential political rival here at home. But besides the complaint that kicked this off being based on basically a rumor, there’s also the foreign minister for Ukraine coming out and saying there was no such pressure in the phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Fox reports:
“I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told the Hromadske media outlet. “There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.”
So the initial report was a rumor, and the involved nation is denying the event took place.
Democrats and true believers will definitely think “that doesn’t prove he didn’t do it” and “this is exactly the kind of thing he would do” but, guess what y’all? That don’t make a damn. You have to have evidence. There has to be something there for you to treat this like a “constitutional crisis” or whatever the latest fancy sounding phrase is for “we just really still can’t accept that people voted for him in 2016.”
Sorry Charlie. Next?