Thankfully, the holiday break also gave us a little break from the onslaught of impeachment news. But the New York Times pulled together a lot of the information we’ve learned over the past several months and published it in one big article. So I recapped that this week as well. And before you say ‘but the NYT is biased,’ everything in that article is verifiable with other sources.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 29…

General Happenings:

1. Trump retweets a tweet identifying a person alleged to be the whistleblower. The original tweet is from an account that’s been removed several times for being a Russia-backed account. The tweet briefly disappears after a glitch, so people think Trump deleted it. He didn’t—it came back up.

• • Donald Trump Jr. has also spread the name, as have conservative news outlets. Outing a whistleblower is against the law unless you’re the president.

2. Mitch McConnell says he hasn’t ruled out hearing witness testimony in a Senate trial, but he won’t agree to it in advance.
3. Pelosi continues to hold on to the articles of impeachment, saying the House needs to know what kind of trial will be conducted to know how many House managers to assign. Republicans say Democrats are delaying because their case is so thin.
4. The White House floats the argument that Trump isn’t impeached because the House hasn’t sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
5. White House aides say Trump is confident he can win the messaging war via Twitter. What? How is messaging even a part of impeachment? Either he did something wrong or he didn’t.
6. The House Judiciary Committee says they can add articles of impeachment if Don McGahn provides additional evidence. The committee is trying to get a federal appeals court to force McGahn to testify in their investigation into possible obstruction of justice as laid out in the Mueller report.
7. A few Republican Senators have been making noises about being “disturbed” by Mitch McConnell’s coordination with the White House on the impeachment trial. That doesn’t mean they’ll do anything about it though.

The New York Times Sums It Up:

The New York Times publishes a summary of interviews with dozens of current and former government officials, newly released emails and documents, and the impeachment transcripts, putting it all together in one place.

1. Here’s a rough timeline of events around withholding military aid to Ukraine:

• • On May 23, Trump pushed back on assurances from Gordon Sondland, Mick Mulvaney, and senior advisor Richard Blair that Ukraine President Zelensky was committed to combatting corruption. Trump said, “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people.”
  • Blair told the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on June 19 “we need to hold it up,” talking about the military aid.
  • Top officials learned about the hold by accident in a July 18 meeting, where a midlevel OMB official spilled the tea. After that meeting, the House Foreign Affairs Committee received four calls asking them to look into the hold.
  • On July 25, Trump and Zelensky have “the” phone call where Trump asked for a favor, though. He wanted Zelensky to look into Biden and into Ukraine interference in the 2016 election. This was the same day the actual request to freeze the aid happened and the same day that Ukraine seized a Russian tanker, a possible escalation in hostilities. A day Ukraine needed our support to be seen as having strong backing.
  • The weekend before the Pentagon’s deadline to spend the budgeted money (August 12), Mulvaney tried to schedule a call with Trump, who was at his New Jersey country club. But he had to hold up that meeting so Trump could golf with golf pro John Daly (on August 12).
  • On August 16, Bolton appealed to Trump to release the aid, bringing him a memo saying that the Nation Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department all wanted the aid released.
  • On August 28, Politico published their story about the aid being withheld, making the issue public.
  • On August 31, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Trump to ask about whether the aid was contingent on getting a commitment to pursue investigations. Johnson says Trump told him it wasn’t. Around this time, Trump also learned about the whistleblower complaint.
  • On September 1, Zelensky asked Mike Pence about the aid being blocked, and Pence told him to talk to Trump. On the same day, Sondland told Zelensky’s aides that they shouldn’t expect to see any aid until they publicly announce the requested investigations.
  • On September 9, three House committees announced they were opening investigations into the freeze on military aid.
  • On September 11, Trump agreed to release the aid.

2. But while all that was going on, these things also happened:

• • Richard Blair told Mulvaney that he could expect Congress to become “unhinged” if the administration withheld the aid designated by Congress for Ukraine. The same adviser warned that it would also make Trump look even more pro-Russia.
  • Trump’s demands for investigations created conflict and confusion in the State Department, White House, and Pentagon.
  • Opposition to the order to withhold aid from Ukraine was stronger than previously reported. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and national security advisor John Bolton met with Trump to try to dissuade him.
  • Trump didn’t announce he was withholding aid publicly, he didn’t tell Congress, and he didn’t tell Ukraine (though Congress and Ukraine figured it out on their own).
  • The OMB spent months trying to come up with a reasonable justification for withholding the aid.
  • The involved officials raised questions about the legality, but those concerns were brushed aside.
  • Some officials claimed ignorance or said they didn’t put it together that there were two different channels working on Ukraine. Bill Taylor took about five minutes to figure it out, so I don’t buy their claims of ignorance.
  • Mick Mulvaney removed himself from meetings so he could legitimately say he didn’t know the whole story. But Sondland’s testimony indicates that Mulvaney was aware of the bigger picture.
  • The OMB and the Pentagon’s top budget official were at odds over this.
  • People who questioned the hold or pushed back on it were told they just had to hold the aid for now until they could revisit the issue with Trump. This indicates to me that most of the people involved knew it was wrong but didn’t know how to say no to Trump.
  • One thing that made it tricky to justify the hold was the Pentagon had already certified that Ukraine met the requirements. The Pentagon had already notified Congress it intended to spend the money as specified.
  • Mark Sandy, who controls the flow of money at the Pentagon, was asked to attach a footnote to his approval noting the hold—something he’d never done in 12 years working there.
  • The White House removed Mark Sandy’s control over the aid freeze and gave it to a political appointee, Mike Duffey, who issued several subsequent temporary holds.
  • Diplomats and foreign officials were working on the issue, as was Giuliani, during the time the aid was being withheld and just prior to it.
  • Throughout this all, officials were talking to a CIA agent who was able to put all the threads together, culminating in the whistleblower report.
  • Disagreements flared through August and September, some OMB officials resigned, John Bolton resigned, the Pentagon continued to fight for the release of aid, and the White House continued to search for legal justification for the hold.
  • Even Republican Senators pushed Trump to release the aid.