Isn't it brave of John Yoo to go on CNN to walk back his smear of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman? What a guy. So courageous, such a truth-teller.

Chris Cuomo put Yoo's feet to the fire right out of the gate, and Yoo first tried to weasel out of his original words.

"I wasn't questioning Lieutenant Colonel Vindman's patriotism," Yoo said. "I have a lot of respect for people who wear the uniform."

Here comes the bullshit: "It seemed to me the Ukrainians were engaging in espionage and I really regret the choice of words but I was thinking about Ukrainians engaging in espionage, not Lieutenant Vindman."

Excuse me? How do you get "Some might call it espionage" to point at the Ukrainians when Laura Ingraham clearly set the table to smear Vindman? That is what we call a lame excuse in this household, and apparently Chris Cuomo also thought so.

"You're a smart guy, I've done my homework on you," Cuomo said. "Laura Ingraham was trying to assassinate the character of Vindman. She's a proxy for our president, she's a brilliant legal mind, a talented communicator and she was trying to protect this president."

"How could you have thought she was talking about Ukraine when she was talking about Vindman? You know they came to him for help with Giuliani. He was doing his job. How could you let her get away with that?" Cuomo pressed, clearly skeptical.

Once again, Yoo retreated into the assertion that the Ukrainians were engaged in espionage, without any foundation or truth. "What I focused on was a foreign government trying to call an official at our National Security Council and get advice on how to deal with Rudy Giuliani, who I agree with you has gone completely off the reservation," Yoo insisted.
"That's an effort to make a contact and engage in espionage. Not on Lieutenant Colonel Vindman's part."

That doesn't pass the smell test. At all. It was clear who he was talking about and this is just a way for him to paper it over.

Yoo did, however, offer up a nugget I'm sure he wouldn't dare say as plainly on Fox News.

"[Vindman] was confirming the facts of what we already knew, which was that President Trump had made a call with the president of Ukraine and had seemed to ask for a quid pro quo between releasing Ukrainian aid and conducting some investigation into Hunter Biden and his service on a natural gas company board," Yoo said.

And when Chris Cuomo asked if he had any doubts about it, he said, "I don't have any doubts about that because you can read them in the transcript of the phone call that the White House released."

He added, "That was my point was that Lieutenant Colonel Vindman shouldn't be the key character in all this. He's just confirming all the facts laid out in the previous testimony and in the telephone call."

Oh, well. If only Republicans and Donald Trump saw it that way. Perhaps they would if he said so on Fox News instead of CNN. Just sayin'.