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[NATIONALREVIEW] Schiff’s overweening ambition and ego drove him into a full-fledged, prime-daytime soap opera. Previously washed and rinsed witnesses returned for televised cross-examinations with Schiff in the star inquisitor role. He apparently thought he could outperform his own Republican colleagues on camera — people he had blatantly misrepresented for weeks.

But television allowed the country to conclude that seeing and hearing Schiff all day long was a different experience from catching minute- or two-minute glimpses of him. The TV version was entirely toxic.

In person, some of the House civil-servant witnesses were haughty. They were certainly obsessed with their positions, titles, and résumés, and eager to talk down to others while talking themselves up. But mostly they sounded incoherent in decrying a brief hold on military assistance to Ukraine by a president who in fact has armed Ukrainians in a way his predecessor never dared. Most of the public came away with several general takeaways — all harmful to the Democrats.

One, the more viewers learned of the corrupt, wily Ukrainians (who were constantly shifting alliances to bet on the anticipated 2016 front-runner), the more they thought that Trump might have been circumspect to have held up, if only for a few weeks, U.S. military assistance in the first place, at least until he learned the nature of the new Ukrainian president. The more one learned about the baffling array of freelancing and often duplicitous Ukrainian ambassadors, prosecutors, foreign ministers, presidents, and gas directors, the more one concluded it might be better to let them get their house in order first.

Two, why blast a president who armed the Ukrainians while staying silent about a prior president who refused military aid and even used non-military aid as a lever to adjudicate Ukraine prosecutions?

Three, the House Republican interrogators, previously mostly unknown, turned out to be far more effective cross-examiners than their Democratic counterparts, in part because the latter were trying to remove a president on the basis of hearsay.

While Democrats talked of Fiona Hill’s pigtails as an eleven-year-old and raincoat metaphors, Republicans Conaway, Jordan, Nunes, Ratcliffe, Stefanik, Stewart, Turner, and Wenstrup drew out contradictions, hearsay, fuzzy memories, and mostly anemic “I suppose,” “I heard,” “I assumed,” and “I presumed,” rather than documents, tapes, and proofs from the witnesses.

Schiff had no White House tape of Trump channeling Richard Nixon’s obscenity-ridden machinations, a Ken Starr or a Leon Jaworski report, or Monica’s stained dress.

By Thursday night, a pale Schiff was reduced to mock outrage and lecturing a purportedly dense nation — on the admissibility of hearsay. When the last remarks of the chairman were to rail into the microphone, one knew he had lost control of his star chamber.