Whew! What a wild 72-day week this has been. And despite what you might be hearing in the media, it's entirely unclear whether the House Intelligence Committee's series of depositions and open hearings is finished, or whether there might be more to come. Put a pin in that until later in this post, because there's a court ruling coming Monday that we're waiting for, and we're pretty sure Congress is waiting for, to determine exactly what comes next. (In fact, we think this is why we're seeing Politico articles like this one, saying Democrats aren't giving solid answers on what comes next, therefore THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO! DEMS IN DISARRAY!)

First, though, we want to lavish more praise on this clip from Dr. Fiona Hill's testimony on Thursday. You've probably already seen it, and you probably want to see it again.

Dr. Fiona Hill: Sondland Was Involved In A 'Domestic Political Errand' In Ukraine | NBC Newswww.youtube.com

In this clip, Hill answers a question from GOP lawyer Steve Castor about part of Gordon Sondland's closed-door deposition where he speaks of a meeting at the end of Hill's tenure this summer where she was just CRAZY LADY EMOTIONAL EATING BON-BONS ON THE FAINTING COUCH CLINGING TO HER PURSE CHIHUAHUA FOR COMFORT LEST SHE DIE OF CONSUMPTION! Truly, why was the lady so upset?

We really don't know why Castor thought it would be a good idea to ask this question, but if he wanted an answer, he got one. In the space of two minutes, Dr. Hill beat the shit out of Sondland's sexism and then moved on to giving the most searing and concise summation of the crimes Trump and his most trusted minions committed against Ukraine. It's a long transcript, and we include it here for easy copy/pasting purposes, in case you want to have it turned into wallpaper for your living room.

Witness the key points she lays out:

Well, I think you might recall in my deposition on October 14th that I said that very unfortunately I had a bit of a blowup with Ambassador Sondland and I had a couple of testy encounters with him. One of those was in June '18 when I actually said to him, "Who put you in charge of Ukraine?" And I'll admit I was a bit rude. And that's when he told me "the president," which shut me up.

The crimes were always directed from the top.

And this other meeting, it was about 15, 20 minutes, exactly as he depicted it was. I was actually, to be honest, angry with him. And I hate to say it, but often when women show anger, it's not fully appreciated. It's often, you know, pushed onto emotional issues perhaps or deflected onto other people.

Maybe she broke a nail while spilling red wine and chocolate all over her brand new prom dress! Or you know, not that, and also go eat shit in hell.

And what I was angry about was that he wasn't coordinating with us.

Now actually I realize, having listened to his deposition, that he was absolutely right, that he wasn't coordinating with us because we weren't doing the same thing that he was doing. So I was upset with him that he wasn't fully telling us about all of the meetings that he was having. And he said to me, "but I'm briefing the president. I'm briefing Chief of Staff [Mick] Mulvaney, I'm briefing Secretary [Mike] Pompeo and I've talked to Ambassador [John] Bolton. Who else do I have to deal with?" And the point is we have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine. It includes Mr. [David] Holmes, it includes Ambassador [Bill] Taylor, as the chargé in Ukraine, it includes a whole load of other people. But it struck me when, yesterday, when when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's emails and who was on these emails, and he said, these [are] the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security and foreign policy.

And those two things had just diverged.

"A domestic political errand." Fiona Hill comes both to destroy Gordon Sondland, and also to confirm the most key parts of his testimony, which was that there were crimes, it was a quid pro quo, and "everyone was in the loop." You know, except the actual professionals who were there to conduct actual American foreign policy. The rest of them -- except for perhaps John Bolton, who ordered Hill to make sure White House lawyers knew he was most certainly not involved in this "drug deal," maybe he should tell Congress about that -- they were all participants in the crime.

Pompeo. Mulvaney. Trump. "Everyone was in the loop."

Oh, and elsewhere in her testimony, Fiona Hill called BULLFUCKINGROAR on Gordon Sondland and anybody else (fucking Kurt Volker go fuck yourself motherfucker) still pretending they didn't know "Burisma" was a code word for investigating the Bidens. David Holmes, who testified alongside Dr. Hill, also called bullfuckingroar on that.

So he was correct. And I had not put my finger on that at the moment, but I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn't fully coordinating. And I did say to him, "Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up." And here we are.

"AND HERE WE ARE." Put it on a fucking t-shirt.

And after I left to my next meeting, our director for the European Union talked to him much further for a full half hour or more later, trying to ask him about how we could coordinate better. How all of us could coordinate better, after I had left the office. And his feeling was that the National Security Council was always trying to block him. What we were trying to do, was block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that was precisely what I was trying to do. But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been.

And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things had diverged. And I realized in fact that I wasn't really being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out and we were doing something that we thought was just as or perhaps even more important, but it wasn't in the same channel.

Sondland was in the crime channel, doing crimes for the Criminal-in-Chief. They just had different jobs, that's all. Dr. Fiona Hill is very sorry for stomping Gordon Sondland's dick like that. She just didn't see all the outlines of the crimes she was witnessing yet.

Now she does. "And here we are."

And that was the moment Dr. Fiona Hill broke Steve Castor, who was quite frankly already pretty broke-dick after this week and a half of hearings, for which he had been hired to literally defend the indefensible. So Devin Nunes took over to "help." SPOILER, Devinnnnnnnn just made clips for "Hannity" by mooing about dumbfuck conspiracy theories about the 2016 election, conspiracy theories Fiona Hill in her excellent opening statement had already explained were Russian propaganda. (BuzzFeed has an excellent piece this week on the fully alternate reality Republicans and the rightwing media have constructed around these hearings. It's important for understanding where we actually are, and what we are really up against at this grave moment in American history.)

So Where To Next?

We don't know.

But we have a couple of clues. There's a ruling coming down on Monday from Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on whether former White House counsel Don McGahn, a private citizen, is required to comply with Congress's subpoena for testimony. Most people paying close attention believe this will serve as a guide both for whether Democrats will now bring down the hammer on other people who need to testify, and for whether John Bolton himself will decide to testify and give up all the information HE'S BEEN SAYING he has to share, or if he will just take his big money dollar advance to write it down in a book nobody wants to read, while America burns.

For private citizen John Bolton, the man we crossed the street with at the RNC in 2016, marveling at just how large his mustache really is, especially as compared to his very tiny man body, Wonkette has a message, and it goes like this:

WTF JOHN BOLTON GO EAT A DICK WITH YOUR FACE AND GO TAKE A MUSTACHE RIDE IN CONGRESS, BECAUSE NOBODY WAS GOING TO READ YOUR DUMBFUCK BOOK ANYWAY, AND THE RNC ISN'T GOING TO PRE-BUY ALL YOUR BOOKS FROM BOOKS-A-MILLION LIKE THEY DID FOR UNCANNY VALLEY-FACED DONALD TRUMP JR., TO GET YOU ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST, OMG GO EAT A MUSTACHE RIDE AND TESTIFY, YOU CHICKENSHIT LOSER.

You know, or something like that.

Speaking of, y'all see this tweet from John Bolton this morning?

OH GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Anyway!

Our gut feeling on this is that the hearings better not be over. Literally every witness has confirmed the details of Trump's crime this week, and there are many in the Democratic caucus who correctly believe that we absolutely have enough evidence to go forward. But we don't have it from somebody famous, somebody who might actually make Republicans sit up and listen. We need it from Bolton.

We need it from Mick Mulvaney, who has already confessed.

We need it from Mike Pompeo, who is crying right now about how Democrats are trying to make him and Donald Trump get a divorce with these hearings, UNFAIR! Witnesses throughout this week and a half have confirmed that Pompeo is up to his chunky grundle in this scheme.

We need it from Rudy Giuliani, who is currently under criminal investigation, if only to watch that man fuck himself on live TV.

Oh yeah, and HUH WEIRD, but Rudy Giuliani's indicted Chucklefuck pal Lev Parnas has a lawyer who is leakingall kinds of shit, as if to scream "HI, ADAM SCHIFF! LEV KNOWS STUFF! LEV WOULD LIKE TO GIVE ALL THE INFORMATION AND GET IMMUNITIES, AND MAYBE THEN THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK MIGHT ALSO BE NICE TO HIM MAYBE?"

We have the facts, but we also have political reality to contend with. We are not yet at the moment where this shit is signed, sealed and delivered, because one entire political party in America is hellbent on creating an alternate reality and endorsing Donald Trump's crimes.

And we may not get there! At this point, the GOP may be that fully divorced from any semblance of allegiance to American values and the rule of law. It might not even make a dent for Senate Republicans. Sad, but true.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't make this as painful as humanly possible for them.

Onward.

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