When everything a government official does is directed and authorized by the president, does that really make it rogue?

Happy Wednesday, November 20. In perhaps the most highly-anticipated day of the impeachment inquiry hearings so far, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland will testify this morning. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.

The “we” in the title is admittedly doing a lot of work, as they say. “We” applies to some of us more than others. Indeed, I should say I found much of Amb. Volker’s testimony far short of credible. But if we take his claims at face value he found himself, to use his words, trying to “thread the needle.” He could see that the requests from Rudy Giuliani (and the President) were at least problematic, specifically the focus on the company Burisma and what he now says he should have understood was targeting the Bidens. But if he could interpret these demands in such a way that they seemed facially legitimate (just a general restatement of the need to root out corruption in Ukraine) then he could provide what they were asking for in good conscience and advance the policy aims he genuinely seems to have believed in.

Burisma did have a reputation of corruption and even though he thought the claims about the 2016 election were baseless, what harm would there really be in looking into them? In other words, by adopting a kind of willful blindness to what was actually happening he could try to address Giuliani and Co’s demands with a clean conscience.

This is a microcosm of what the whole country is facing, and especially those involved in running the federal government and its national security functions.

One of the interesting themes of these hearings is the question of who controls US foreign policy: the President or the sum of the “interagency” or bureaucratic policy making process. In a narrow sense it is absolutely right that if all the President’s advisors (in the sense of the sum of everyone at State, DOD, the NSC, Intelligence Community, etc) decide on one policy and the President disagrees, the President’s choice governs. This is elementary. And if you listen to the various testimonies no one who has spoken as a witness has said otherwise. But there’s a part of this that bears closer examination. Because it gets at the underbelly of so-called theories of “unitary executive” power.

Two new deposition transcripts have been released this evening, for David Holmes and David Hale.

Folks on the right are focusing on statements from departed NSC Director Tim Morrison’s deposition in which he says he “had concerns about Lt. Col. Vindman’s judgment.” We don’t know a lot about Alexander Vindman. So perhaps there are issues with his judgement. On the basis of the available evidence though I’d take Vindman’s judgment over Morrison’s, in large part because he immediately reported the substance of Trump’s July 25th call with Zelensky to the White House Counsel’s office. Morrison simply recommended access to it be restricted, not that that there was anything wrong with what happened. But there’s an aspect of Vindman’s testimony I’ve been wanting to highlight since I read it soon after its release.

Happy Monday, November 18. Emails from EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland solidify the growing picture of an administration tightly lashed to the Ukraine pressure campaign. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.

I wanted to flag this brief account by Fareed Zakaria which comes after Matt Shuham’s report from last week about just how close Ukrainian President Zelensky came to delivering the “investigations” Trump demanded. As you’ve likely heard, the announcement was to come on Zakaria’s CNN show, Fareed Zakaria GPS. It got canceled only when the news of the whistleblower complaint was finally going public. It had seemed that the interview was likely scheduled for September 13th and canceled as late as the morning of that day. But according to Zakaria it was only canceled on the 18th or the 19th of September.

This isn’t just a matter of a few days difference.