Republicans complained the first impeachment hearing was 'boring' — they'll be pleased to hear Marie Yovanovitch promises fireworks

'She's going to eat these people for lunch,' one former state official told me

On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Denny Heck predicted that those who tuned in to watch the first hearing of the impeachment inquiry "may have the opportunity to hear something new" that wasn't included in the previously released transcripts of closed-door depositions.

Heck's cryptic prediction proved correct.

As Taylor neared the end of his prepared remarks at the hearing's outset, he dropped a bombshell: Not one week ago, a member of his staff at the US embassy in Kyiv told him that he'd been at a restaurant with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, when he heard him place a call on his cellphone.

The voice on the other end was that of President Trump, the staffer told him.

"The member of my staff could hear President Trump on the phone, asking Ambassador Sondland about ‘the investigations’. Ambassador Sondland told President Trump that the Ukrainians were ready to move forward," Taylor said, adding that Sondland had told the staffer that Trump cared more about whether Ukraine's government initiated a politically motivated investigation into former vice-president Joe Biden than about Ukraine itself.

The revelation of a new witness who heard Trump speak about his desire for “investigations” — later identified by the Associated Press as David Holmes, the political counselor at the embassy in Kyiv — counters one of the main criticisms Republicans have leveled at the investigation conducted by House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff; namely that the testimony offered by witnesses like Taylor and Kent is "hearsay."

But even after the AP identified a second staffer — Kyiv-based foreign service officer Suriya Jayanti — who'd overheard Sondland's call with Trump, White House officials remained unimpressed.

"That doesn't make it any less hearsay," one administration official said.

Instead of addressing this new development, Republicans and Trump defenders have spent the last 24 hours deriding Tuesday's hearing as "boring."

"This sham hearing is not only boring, it is a colossal waste of taxpayer time and money," White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted during the hearing.

Trump's son Eric also chimed in with a similar sentiment, writing that the hearing was "horribly boring."

Some accounts of the hearing in American media echoed those charges, with NBC's Jonathan Allen writing that "it was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic."

But a former State Department official who prepared witnesses for appearances before Congress as part of his job told me Taylor and Kent were "great" and did exactly what they were supposed to do.

"I think the state department witnesses established their own personal credibility… which is the appropriate way to go to demonstrate the sort of nonpartisan frame that they occupy — and it worked," said Joel Rubin, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs from 2014 to 2015. "They actually provided a real factual record that is setting the groundwork for the subsequent days, and they articulated what's at stake in a way that we haven't yet really seen discussed on this impeachment issue.”

Rubin dismissed criticism that the hearings lacked fireworks by noting that the memorable moments from investigations past usually only became memorable in hindsight.

"Having watched dozens, hundreds of congressional hearings and worked on them, it's rare that you find that there's that one single 'a-ha!' moment that changes the entire opinion on that day," he said.

One veteran trial lawyer, former deputy Watergate special prosecutor Nick Akerman, said House Democrats did exactly what they needed to do at yesterday's hearing.

"You had the story told, which I think is the most important thing for the House to do to educate the public. It was like being in a trial," said Akerman, now a partner at Dorsey and Whitney in New York.

Akerman singled out the performance of House Intelligence Committee Democratic Counsel Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, for praise.

"I thought he did an excellent job compared with most of the members who asked questions,” Akerman said. "What was great about the attorneys is you don't have them making statements like, 'Oh this was, you know, hearsay' or whatever... they just brought out the facts and that's where it was most effective."

Akerman also praised the performances of Kent and Taylor, adding that he wished he could use them as witnesses in his work today.

"They make a great appearance, they come across as very thoughtful, methodical, they took their time in answering questions, and they were very precise," he said. "They couldn't be led into some area that they could get tripped up on, they were well-prepared and they were very straightforward and they basically laid out a story of what happened."

Joel Rubin added that Taylor's and Kent's testimony was only the first of many public sessions, and predicted that some moments that escaped much attention yesterday would later be rolled back into the story by Democrats.

"The challenge will be to weave the story so that the American people will get the full weight of all of the issues tied together in a more comprehensive package," he said, comparing the impeachment inquiry to the popular HBO series The Wire. "These congressional hearings are multiple seasons. It's not like there's one single one. So I hear the criticism of not enough pizazz or not enough fireworks, but that's absolutely not the point. They're pulling out lots of strings and there will be a point when they look back and highlight moments that will be pointed to as the turning point moments.”

Rubin predicted that Friday's hearing, set to feature former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, will satisfy viewers' — and pundits' — desire for televised drama. He anticipated that Yovanovitch would come across as eminently credible, and someone who meets Trump's desire to have his administration officials look as if they came from "central casting."

"If you're looking for a witness who can cut a figure of someone who was aggrieved throughout this process, she will work," he said. "These guys [Taylor and Kent] are character witnesses, but she's the character. She was a victim of a smear campaign, she lost her job, and she was fighting corruption in Ukraine.”

Yovanovitch, Rubin explained, will be able to flip Republicans' claim that Trump was merely a sympathetic character seeking to combat corruption in Ukraine on its head.

"She can basically say, I was fighting corruption. I can tell you who these people were, and all of a sudden I was fired because they who are associates of Rudy Giuliani led a smear campaign to get rid of me," he said, adding that her credibility will be "extremely high."

"She'll build off of the credibility that Taylor and Kent gave as a senior state department official, and then she'll lean into that and leverage that to explain how her work basically was terminated in order for the president's Ukraine political agenda to advance," he continued. "She's going to basically blow a hole in a lot of the current Republican arguments. Not because she's trying to, but because of her character and her fact witness argument about corruption. She's going to eat these guys for lunch, so if people are looking for fireworks, they should tune in tomorrow.”