Article snippet: WASHINGTON — It could have been worse. That’s the argument Republicans put forward during the first televised impeachment hearing Wednesday, when two longtime diplomats testified for nearly six hours about Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to hijack US diplomacy on behalf of President Trump and pressure Ukraine to open an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden and his son. “This irregular channel of diplomacy, it’s not as outlandish as it could be, is that correct?” the Republicans’ staff counsel, Steve Castor, asked William Taylor, the US ambassador to Ukraine. Taylor, an unflappable witness with a radio announcer voice, laughed out loud and then conceded the situation could conceivably have been even weirder. The Republican counsel’s modest goal of establishing that the events in Ukraine fell short of being truly outrageous was the latest effort by the GOP to offer a defense of Trump. It even differed from the president’s own message that the hearing is a made up “witch hunt” propagated by political enemies. As the diplomats arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning and Americans prepared to tune in to the historic live broadcast, Trump took to Twitter to levy his gravest insult. “NEVER TRUMPERS!” he called the first witnesses. (The two men, who’ve served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, rejected that label.) But even Trump’s most ardent defenders did not take up his line of argument for the most part, suggesting he faces a rocky road over t... Link to the full article to read more