They looked the part. If Donald Trump were to cast the characters for career US diplomats specialising in Eastern Europe, William Taylor and George Kent would have made the cut.

Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, and Kent, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department, delivered the sort of analytical and sedate testimony that comes from decades stationed abroad in locations that make it onto the news only if something has gone horribly wrong.

During more than five-and-a-half hours of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Democrats found two witnesses who came across as experts in their field. Kent sported a bow tie, with a three-piece suit, while Taylor wore a traditional dark power suit that was amplified with a booming voice that some TV viewers likened to America’s most famous 20th-century newsman, Walter Cronkite.

They aren’t household names and lacked the blockbuster revelations, but Taylor and Kent brought to life the story that Democrats have been telling only in bits and pieces.

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Even Trump’s staunchest allies vouched for their character when the testimony concluded. “They’re credible public servants,” Republican Congressman Mark Meadows told reporters.

He quickly suggested that they lacked credibility because they never spoke directly to Trump or to other senior White House officials, dismissing their story as hearsay evidence, as most GOP members of the committee had done.

But Democrats saw these witnesses, the first public testimony in what will be a few weeks of open hearings, as laying the foundation to impeach Trump over his intervention in Ukrainian affairs.

Taylor and Kent testified that Trump pressuring Ukrainian officials to launch investigations into Democratic rivals violated their understanding of diplomatic norms and that his personal intervention in delaying nearly $400m (€364m) in security aid violated several decades of bipartisan foreign policy.

That their testimony came across a bit dry at times reinforced what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called “a prayerful day for all of us” in a closed-door Democratic caucus meeting before the hearing started, according to the notes of a Democrat in the room.

From their opening statements, the diplomats tried to set the tone by each outlining their long tenures in public service and their families’ history in the military.

Five of Kent’s great-uncles served in the navy and army during World War II, including one who survived the Bataan Death March only to end up spending three years in Japanese prisoner of war camps.

Taylor outlined more than 50 years of service, starting as a cadet at the US Military Academy and then as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.

“I am non-partisan and have been appointed to my positions by every president from President Reagan to President Trump,” he said in opening his testimony.

Taylor brought with him one piece of new information, revealing that one of his aides in Kiev just told him about a phone conversation on July 26 between Trump and the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland.

That came the day after Trump’s now-famous call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which, according to a partial transcript released by the White House, the president asked Zelensky to “do us a favour” to conduct investigations into his political rivals.

On that call, Taylor’s aide could hear the president’s voice, and afterwards the aide inquired about Trump’s views of Ukraine. “President Trump cares more about the investigations,” Sondland replied, according to Taylor.

Republicans tried at times to knock the diplomats off their position or at least to demean their testimony as third-hand whispers about what the president might have thought.

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, newly installed to the panel for his bulldog style, lived up to that reputation with rapid-fire questions that few people in attendance could follow, let alone the witnesses.

(© Washington Post)

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