A top Hungarian official recently stated that George Kent is not a credible witness for the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, poking fun at his allegations that Prime Minister Viktor Orban encouraged the president to view Ukraine negatively. Here’s more from Washington Examiner: “This is a great honor for us, to be honest, that we were portrayed as a central European country which can change the position of the president of the United States,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto joked in an interview with the Washington Examiner on the sidelines of the NATO Leaders’ Meeting. “It can be taken as an honor. Well, I’m afraid it has distance from reality, to be honest.” Orban emerged as an unlikely player in the Ukraine impeachment controversy in October, when a senior State Department official testified that the Hungarian leader had contributed to Trump’s distaste for Ukraine. George Kent, one of the State Department’s top officials for Europe, told lawmakers that Orban echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin in portraying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as in a “thrall” of corruption. “He’s not that credible in this regard,” Szijjarto said of Kent, whom he noted did not attend Orban’s May 13 meeting with Trump. “Simply because he was not there. I was there, he was not there.” “Viktor Orban’s beef with Ukraine is derived in part [from] his vision, in my opinion, of a greater Hungary. This issue of greater Hungary is at the top of Orban’s agenda. And so he has picked this particular issue and, for instance, blocked all meetings in NATO with Ukraine at the ministerial level or above because of this particular issue. So, his animus towards Ukraine is well-known, documented, and has lasted now two years,” Kent continued. Kent then went on to say in his testimony that the Hungarian…

As the day and time draws near for the House of Representatives to vote on articles of impeachment, which are being drafted now, against President Trump, much of what the public thinks about this whole situation hasn’t changed all that much since before the public hearings began. Which is precisely why Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan is calling on journalists to try and find better ways to change hearts and minds on the issue and persuade Americans to get on board with booting the president. Here’s more from TheBlaze: “Despite the hardened positions, some members of the public are still uncertain,” Sullivan writes. “Some are persuadable, and yes, it matters. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the job of American journalism in this moment to get serious about trying to reach these citizens.” Sullivan notably does not take an overt position regarding whether people need to be persuaded for or against impeachment. The closest she comes to that is when she writes, “We do live in a country that abides by laws and a Constitution, and nobody ought to be above them.” “And far too often, those [television news] broadcasts fall prey to a false equivalency: This side said this, and this side said that, and we don’t want to make anyone mad, so we’ve got to cut to commercial now,” Sullivan writes. Sullivan speaks against “epistemological nihilism,” a term coined by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg to describe the “long-term Republican strategy” of saying that there are no set facts or truth, something stated by House Judiciary Committee ranking member Doug Collins (R-Ga.) during Wednesday’s hearing. So what, exactly, does Sullivan purpose to help win folks over? How about a “movie trailer” kind of approach which takes big chunks of the impeachment narrative and condenses it into a “targeted, well-informed…