the president. let s talk about some of this. and joining me on the set, msnbc legal analyst danny cevallos and with us from washington, congressional reporter for the daily beast, sam brody. sam, good morning to you. i want to discuss some of your major take-aways first and foremost from the first day of thef public impeachment inquir hears and also this new information included in ambassador taylor s testimony with regards to this phone call between the president and gordon sondland, in this ukrainian restaurant. yes, i think it is going to be here this morning, few people including somefe of the lawmake i spoke with were surprised that bill taylori would show up and ultimately drop a really new piece of information that isn t necessarily a game changer, but really has a significant impact on themp case that democrats ar trying to make here. he tooifed another person with apparently first, he identified another person with apparently firsthand knowledge of the president sfi direc
republicans stuck to some of the core themes which were sometimes inconsistent. when you defend a case, you can throw out different alternative theories but sometimes they can be confusing. republicans didn t stick to a consistent theme. instead, they have jumped around from ukraine is very corrupt, burisma is very corrupt, corruption needs to investigated, to something inconsistent which is oh, none of you are credible anyway, we don t believe what you said, not because you re bad people, there is no question these witnesses had plenty of integrity and character, but instead, they were relying on double, triple, even quadruple hearsay, which while it is not a rule of evidence in this hearing, it is just inherently unreliable. so the republicans had several different themes that they all threw against the wall, some may have stuck, it may not have moved the needle ultimately. sam, i want to talk a bit about the whistle-blower, jim jordan leading up once again that he wants the whistl
hearsay, hear say is a rule of evidence, it applies in court, an even then, as someone who tries cases, it almost never applies. there are so many exceptions, they swallow the rule. and in this case, one of the exceptions would swallow the rule, because we re not asking for people to believe the actual truth of what the president said on a call, instead look at the effect that it had on everybody, and when the president makes a call, it has a wide-reaching effect. sam, i quickly want to get to the republicans pushback, as you saw, as we saw a little bit earlier, from yesterday, we have heard hearsay over and over again, we have heard that defense a lot. this new defense from jim jordan which we heard which is basically trying to see the president basically vetting the president of ukraine for 52 days or so, and this is kind of this new defense, trying to make sure he was actually legit, that s not necessarily something that we heard before. do you think that that pushback, that defen
goingpi to bolster democrats against this notion that somehow this is all kind of, you know, second, third, fourth-hand knowledge that is fueling their impeachment inquiry. danny, sam makes a really good point, there and i want to get to thean republicans defens of all of this inge a moment bui want to concentrate first on this phone callwa that i just brought up that bill taylor identified just yesterday. he didn t identify in that deposition the closed door deposition that he gavede but i was just yesterdaypo that he identified this. you haveti the president denyin any knowledge of this phone call. denying any knowledge of this phone call it connects the president to how close he could have been to this scheme to ukraine. how does this further implicate the president, if in fact this phone call did take place? before there was evidence of this phone call, the president s defense was developing into really two major prongs. and is very typical of this,
fire, and the implicit threat there is that if you don t pay some money or do something to pay off these corrupt people, then something bad will happen. and if you do what s asked of you, the bad thing doesn t happen. so that theory, that the bad thing, the withholding of aid never happened, isn t going to carry much water. it carries a little but it really ultimately ignores the law of attempt. and quickly, sam, while i have you, what do you expect will be happen when we hear from marie yovanovitch tomorrow. yovanovitch will offer a different take on all of this than some of the other witnesses, she wasn t around for the july 25th call, and the aftermath, but what she can really speak to is we talk a lot about the irregular policy channel. she really represents the regular policy channel, can speak to what the sort of bipartisan policy consensus with respect to ukraine was, before rudy giuliani and these folks came in, trying to implement a certain agenda. so that s going to kind