VIDEO: Impeachment hearings: a word about hearsay

The witch-hunt resumes today, as the Dumbocrats scramble to find someone, anyone who's going to give credible first-hand evidence of Still-President Trump having committed an impeachable offence. It is a stretch greater than yoga pants over a fat girl's bum to call what has been alleged so far "bribery". Nancy Pelosi knows that, which is why she used that word yesterday. Goebbels called it the Big Lie. If you're going to tell an untruth, make it a huge one, and say it early and often.

It became necessary for Speaker Pelosi to cross the line from hysteria to insanity when Wednesday's "bombshell", dropped by Bill Taylor, acting US Ambassador to Ukraine, turned out to be a damp squib. As I understood Mr Taylor's testimony (and I admit I was having difficult staying awake, even at that early hour of the morning), Mr Taylor said that a member of his staff told him that he (the staff member) had overheard, while dining at a restaurant, a conversation between the President and Gordon Sondland, US Ambassador to the European Union, in which Mr Trump allegedly asked Mr Sondland "how the investigations [into alleged corruption at Burisma, a Ukrainian company of which Hunter Biden was a director] were progressing."

Let's parse that, keeping in mind the legal rule against hearsay, a basic tenet of Anglo-American common law, the foundation of the legal systems of the AABC countries. What is hearsay? This short (2:48) video gives the definition. [Sorry if it sounds like "mansplaining". Ed.]



Another reason for disallowing hearsay evidence is that the out-of-court statement might well be a lie, contrived for the purpose of setting up or discrediting the person about whom the statement was made.

So what did Bill Taylor say on Wednesday? He did not say that President Trump had spoken to him. He did not say that President Trump had spoken to Ambassador Sondland and that he (Taylor) had listened in to the phone call, or even overheard it while sitting nearby in a restaurant. Mr Taylor said that his unnamed staffer had told him (Taylor) that he (the staffer) had overheard (not listened directly to) a telephone conversation between President Trump and Ambassador Sondland in which, the way the staffer remembers it, Mr Trump asked something like "How's it going?"

This is offered by Mr Taylor and the Democrats as proof that Still-President Trump was more interested in getting the Bidens than resolving issues in America's relations with Ukraine. Or rather, Mr Taylor said, that was Ambassador Sondland's thinking, which so concerned Mr Taylor that he thought it necessary to express his concern.

If that isn't hearsay piled upon hearsay, I don't know what is! Adam Schiff and his colleagues are going to have to do a lot better than that if they hope to quell the reasonable doubt which even some Dumbocrats are expressing. Well, they're not expressing it to me, but I heard from a friend in Washington that someone had told him that a Democrat had said that to him... or something like that...