So much has happened since we first learned about Trump pressuring Ukraine for political gain, I’ve forgotten all the ways Trump and his administration have twisted the truth along the way trying to justify what went down. Here’s a pretty good, though incomplete, list of the ways we’ve been lied to. And if you’re one of those folks who thinks CNN isn’t a reliable source, they have the receipts. You can follow the links to their source material.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 26…

General Happenings:

1. As Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway, there is pretty much no one who really thinks Trump will be removed from office.
2. The Senate rules ban C-SPAN cameras from the Senate chambers. No audio recordings or still photography will be allowed except from the cameras controlled by the Senate Recording Studio.

• • They will only show the presenters and not any of the Senators.
  • Numerous media outlets send letters requesting C-SPAN cameras be allowed.

3. The following House Republicans join Trump’s legal team: Doug Collins, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Debbie Lesko, Mark Meadows, John Ratcliffe, Elise Stefanik, and Lee Zeldin. They are only there to give guidance, not to present to the Senate.
4. Alan Dershowitz makes a point of saying that he didn’t sign on to the White House’s seven-page rebuttal to the House’s impeachment brief last week.
5. Adam Schiff says that the CIA and NSA are both withholding evidence relevant to the impeachment trial.
6. McConnell and the White House aren’t 100% certain they have all the votes they need to block witnesses, so they have a Plan B. Plan B is to move Bolton’s testimony to a classified setting. It’s an easy argument that since he was the national security adviser, he would have lots of classified info.
7. Republicans keep saying they’re trying to use the same format as the Clinton impeachment trial; but in that trial, the Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate worked closely together to design the trial.
8. Talking to reporters at Davos about impeachment, Trump says, “But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.” House manager Val Demings says this means he just admitted to the obstruction of Congress he’s being accused of by withholding witnesses and material.
9. Trump also says he’d like to see Mulvaney and Bolton testify, though, so maybe they should. But then he backpedals on that, so maybe not.
10. A Trump confidant tells CBS News that GOP Senators were warned that if they vote against Trump in the impeachment trial, “Their heads will be on a pike.” That doesn’t play well when Adam Schiff repeats it on the Senate floor, and Senator Susan Collins breaks with decorum by saying loudly “That’s not true.” Schiff listens and responds, “I hope it’s not true.” But he was clear the entire time he was quoting a news story.
11. Trump defender and Republican Representative Matt Gaetz praises the House managers’ presentation and says Trump’s legal team’s presentation looked like an “eighth-grade book report.”
12. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) says that the evidence presented by the House managers was news to most Senators. How is that even possible? Everybody in the Senate should’ve read the testimony by now.
13. House manager Jason Crow (D-CO) says that how the Senate votes on witnesses will reflect how seriously they’re taking this trial. He adds that all of the information will eventually come out, whether in books, FOIA requests, or a future administration.
14. Trump tweets and retweets 142 times on the first day of House managers’ arguments. And woke up the next day and did it all over again.
15. Trump says that Obama withheld aid to countries like Ukraine, Philippines, Egypt, and others. Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) counters by saying that Obama did it “openly, not using a shifty lawyer and two Ukrainians with a business called ‘Fraud Guaranteed.” Gallego also says Obama didn’t do it for self-interest, but the interest of the country.
16. Each side accuses the other of trying to undermine the 2020 election. Republicans say Democrats are just trying to remove Trump from the ballot. Democrats say that Trump’s interference in the elections means we won’t have free and fair elections with him in office.
17. Senators from both parties view a classified document in a secure facility. The document is provided by Jennifer Williams. Some Democratic Senators say they don’t understand why it was classified. We don’t know what the document is, but we can surmise it’s about the phone conversation Mike Pence had with Zelensky that Pence ordered classified.
18. Republican attorneys general from 21 states call on the Senate to reject both articles of impeachment.
19. A Republican Senator breaks the “no bringing phones into the Senate chambers” rule and their phone goes off in the middle of a presentation.
20. The rest of the world thinks our Senators are playing games and taking naps during the impeachment. They’re acting like bored schoolchildren.
21. Documents indicate that Adam Schiff mischaracterized a text message between Parnas and Giuliani when he implied that “Mr. Z” referred to Zelensky. It actually referred to a Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma.
22. Mike Pompeo defends his treatment of diplomats, including Marie Yovanovitch. He says he’s proud of the administration’s work in Ukraine.

Trump’s Defense Files A Brief:

1. Trump’s legal team submits their 171-page brief, which claims that the two articles of impeachment aren’t impeachable offenses.
2. The brief includes opinions from the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel to support their position that the White House didn’t illegals defy Congress in holding back witnesses and evidence form the impeachment committees.
3. The brief argues the following:

• • The impeachment hearings weren’t about finding the truth.
  • Even if Trump did abuse his power by holding up the aid to Ukraine, it’s not impeachable because there’s no crime. The brief calls the House Democrats theory of abuse of power “novel” and “made up.”
  • There’s no dispute that Trump did what he’s accused of—withhold aid, withhold a White House meeting, and request investigations into the Bidens. But just because Trump did that, it doesn’t mean he withheld one for another. The brief uses the same evolving reasons the White House gave in the weeks after the story first broke.
  • The aid was released and the meeting happened, all without an announcement of the investigations.
  • Trump did this all to root out corruption and to get other countries to help out more.
  • This is a political process, not a criminal one.
  • The impeachment process was rigged, and Democrats shut Trump out of secret hearings in their basement bunker.
  • The transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky shows that Trump brought up corruption.

4. The brief includes a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion supporting Trump’s right to block evidence and witnesses requested by the House committees investigating the administration’s activities around Ukraine.

A few rebuttals here:

1. The Pentagon had certified that Ukraine was in compliance with our anti-corruption conditions, and there’s no record of Trump approaching other national leaders to get them to beef up their contributions. So those don’t seem to have been at the top of his mind in regard to Ukraine.
2. The Constitution was written before our criminal code, so when they defined impeachment, there wasn’t anything in the criminal code to tie it too. It has always been a political process, as it was designed to be. As such, even if a president were to be removed from office, there would be no criminal charges coming from Congress.
3. The “basement bunker” is actually a SCIF, a commonly used room where classified information might come out. People were deposed there. Depositions are typically not public. And after the depositions, the House held public hearings, where they invited Trump and his legal team to take part. They refused.
4. Also, even if the impeachment process were rigged, the Constitution gives the House complete control in how to run impeachment hearings. At the same time, McConnell isn’t breaking any rules by working with Trump’s legal team to design a trial that benefits Trump.
5. The White House meeting never happened—Zelensky was looking for a state visit, not a chance encounter at an international summit.
6. The aid was released only after the issue was publicized.
7. Zelensky was reportedly two days away from announcing the investigations on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show when the military aid was released.
8. There’s no mention of corruption in the transcript; only the investigations into the Bidens and Crowdstrike.

Debating the Rules:

1. The Senate debates for more than 12 hours over the procedural rules of the trial, delaying opening arguments.
2. Mitch McConnell proposes a condensed impeachment trial schedule, with two days of opening arguments per side, not to exceed 24 hours, followed by four hours of debate.
3. Maybe after that, they’ll call witnesses.
4. This could mean 12 hours of opening arguments per day, starting after a full morning of regular Senate work (so 16-hour days for the Senators and for Chief Justice Roberts).
5. Both Democratic and Republican Senators pressure McConnell to extend it to three days each, giving them the option of three eight-hour days.
6. Both Democrat and Republican Senators also pressure McConnell to allow the House managers to present the evidence they gathered at the beginning of the trial.
7. McConnell is working on a rule that would let Trump’s legal team move to dismiss as soon as the arguments are complete. Kind of like a kill switch in case the trial goes on too long.
8. Republicans vote over and over again to defeat Democratic amendments to subpoena new witnesses and evidence,
9. The Senate rules include the option of refusing to hear new evidence or testimony. They also have provisions to prevent certain people, like Bolton, from testifying in public.
10. According to McConnell’s rules, if any witnesses are called, they would have to first be deposed by both sides.
11. Despite the rules that Senators must remain seated and quiet during the proceedings, they’re already walking around when they’re supposed to be seated, and they’re talking when they’re supposed to be quiet. This despite the punishment being imprisonment.
12. During the rules debate, Pat Cipollone was given an hour to make a case in his opening statement—he spoke for three minutes, saying Trump has done nothing wrong.
13. Adam Schiff took 50 minutes of his hour to lay out their entire case, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate the 2020 elections by pressuring Ukraine to announce investigations into Biden.
14. Members of Trump’s legal team repeated some of the misinformation included in their brief, including that Republicans weren’t allowed in the House SCIF during depositions and that Schiff didn’t tell us he was making a parody of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky during his now-infamous paraphrasing of the call.
15. Jay Sekulow claims that Trump was cleared of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report. In actuality, Mueller outlined around a dozen cases of possible obstruction of justice, and he said it’s up to Congress to decide whether to pursue impeachment on them. Legal analysts agree that most of these meet the criteria for obstruction.
16. Sekulow also says that Trump was denied the right to cross-examine witnesses. In fact, Trump and his team declined to participate. How many times must this be debunked?
17. For some reason, Trump’s legal team keeps exaggerating the number of days the House waited to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. It was 28 days, but the team says it was 33. That’s just a useless and weird lie.
18. Trump’s team says the aid to Ukraine got out on time anyway. In reality, because of the delay, $35 million didn’t get out in time and Congress had to extend the deadline.
19. Sekulow gets worked up over a House manager talking about “lawyer lawsuits” and delivers an indignant rebuke to Val Demings. No one knows what he was talking about. Demings had talked about FOIA lawsuits, and she actually introduced the term as “Freedom of Information Act, a.k.a. FOIA lawsuits.” The White House backs up Sekulow and says the transcript has Demings saying lawyer lawsuits. The Federal Document Clearing House transcript includes no mention of “lawyer lawsuits” except Sekulow’s. Why is this a big deal? It shows a continued pattern of lying and not correcting the record even when provided with hard evidence. Also, we can all watch the video of Demings’ presentation.
20. The rules debate goes on past midnight, and Jerrold Nadler at one point raises his voice and accuses Republicans of “treacherous” behavior if they don’t allow witnesses. One of Trump’s lawyers responds angrily. The whole thing leads Chief Justice Roberts to remind both sides to be polite and remember where they are.
21. There’s debate about a trade for witnesses. Republicans could call people like the Bidens if Democrats could call John Bolton. The deal is dropped. Joe Biden says he refuses to part of an impeachment deal.
22. It’s pretty notable that 3/4 of Americans want new witnesses and evidence.
23. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that what Trump did was legal. This despite the GAO finding the opposite and despite the fact that Cornyn just took an oath to be impartial.

House Managers Arguments:

1. Adam Schiff opens up the House managers‘ presentation by outlining their arguments. He says Democrats aren’t overstepping by impeaching; it’s part of Congress’s Constitutional mandate. Here’s the gist of their argument:

• • Trump solicited foreign interference to cheat in an election.
  • He did so by abusing the powers of his office to pressure a foreign country to get involved in our elections.
  • When Trump was caught, he continued to use the powers of his office to obstruct the investigation.

2. Schiff urges Republicans to “protect our democracy” by joining Democrats in voting to remove Trump from office.
3. Schiff presents the facts of the case:

• • Trump mentioned the Bidens and Burisma but not corruption when he talked to Zelensky (you can check it out for yourself).
  • According to Gordon Sondland’s testimony, Trump followed up on whether the investigations he wanted were going to happen.
  • Kurt Volker texted Andriy Yermak, less than 30 minutes before that call to say that if the investigations were announced, they could set up a White House meeting.
  • Trump told reporters that he wanted both Ukraine and China to investigate Biden, which appears like he’s just looking for foreign countries to smear Biden.
  • Sondland and Giuliani rewrote a Ukraine statement announcing investigations into corruption investigations. They specifically added investigations into Burisma and the 2016 elections.
  • When U.S. officials asked Ukraine not to investigate their political opponents, Yermak threw back, “You mean like asking us to investigate Clinton and Biden?”
  • Ukraine faced the possibility of being cut off from vital aid in the middle of a war.
  • The aid was only released after Trump was caught.

4. And then Schiff addresses whether abuse of power is impeachable:

• • Bill Barr and Jonathan Turley have both argued that abuse of power is impeachable.
  • The framers of the Constitution made it clear that they were trying to prevent political crimes.
  • If abuse of power isn’t impeachable, then we don’t have a president, we have a king.

5. Trump’s re-election campaign and the White House both tweet running commentaries during the presentation refuting House managers’ arguments.

• • They say that Trump didn’t withhold a White House meeting with Zelensky; he invited the Ukraine president three times. The UN was their first opportunity to meet.
  • Zelensky himself has said that the UN meeting didn’t fulfill Trump’s promise of a White House meeting, and Trump never offered Zelensky a date.

6. House managers spend the first day of arguments describing Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine to open, or at least announce, investigations into the Bidens while withholding aid and a White House meeting to increase pressure.
7. Schiff walks the Senate through a timeline of the early events in the pressure campaign, and says Mike Pence canceling his trip to Ukraine in May was a pivotal moment.
8. Schiff includes new allegations from Lev Parnas in his presentation.
9. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) criticizes the House managers for being repetitive. I agree that they’re quite repetitive, but I think it’s to get the information to stick. Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) responds by saying, “It is hard to listen to things you don’t want to hear.”
10. An anti-abortion, pro-Trump protestor disrupts proceedings on the first day, shouting “Schumer is the devil!” and “They support abortion!” You could hear him screaming all the way down the hall as police removed him.
11. On the second day, they focus on the allegations of abuse of power, and Schiff explains it will be a little repetitive again today while they show how the facts they presented the previous day fit together.
12. Nadler speculates that Trump’s legal team won’t refute the facts of the testimony or evidence. (Spoiler for next week: they don’t.)
13. Nadler also says a crime isn’t necessary to impeach a president. Constitutional scholars largely agree. Nadler plays a video of Alan Dershowitz saying the same thing about the Clinton investigation. Dershowitz has done an about-face and will argue the opposite.
14. House manager Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) argues that the allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden are groundless. She goes into detail about how Biden’s efforts in Ukraine were done in the open to forward U.S. policy and were supported by our European allies.
15. Garcia also says there’s no factual basis for the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in our 2016 elections. She says that theory only benefits Putin and Trump. Schiff goes on to show that the origin of the conspiracy theory was the Kremlin.
16. Here’s an incredible moment. Garcia brings up a letter signed by Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rob Portman (R-OH), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and other members of the Senate Ukraine Committee in 2016. The letter urged Ukraine to fight corruption, including in the General Prosecutor’s office (the prosecutor at the time was Shokin, whom Biden helped oust).

• • Johnson, who has said he doesn’t remember the letter, gets upset, speaks to Portman, and leaves the Senate floor. He’s still agitated when he returned.
  • He later releases a statement saying that Garcia misrepresented the letter and it was about corruption in general. He must’ve missed the bit about the General Prosecutor.

17. Reporters spot Senator Marcia Blackburn (R-TN) reading a book during the presentation. The book is “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.”

• • The same day, Blackburn repeats an unfounded smear against decorated war veteran Alexander Vindman, and then doubles down with a second tweet calling him vindictive. Let’s remember he has a purple heart.
  • And then, Blackburn breaks the trial rules by giving a live TV interview to Laura Ingraham while proceedings were ongoing and her colleagues were seated in the Senate chamber.
  • Blackburn does not appear to take her job seriously. Maybe all ya’ll could vote her out?

18. Schiff reminds the Senate that Trump has said he can do what he wants under Article II. He argues that since Trump didn’t pay a price for Russian interference in 2016, he’s unrepentant and undeterred, and he’ll keep doing it.
19. Demings says that Senators know better than to think this is about one election. She says it’s bigger than any one election and bigger than any one president.
20. Hakeem Jeffries reminds Senators that, as Sondland testified, everyone was in the loop on the Ukraine operation and Trump directed the whole thing.
21. Sekulow says that the House managers opened the door for Trump’s legal team to go after Biden because House managers defended Biden as sort of a prebuttal to what the defense might say.
22. Jeffries reminds us that the administration did try to bury the transcript on the super-secure server, and that they ran a failed effort to cover the whole thing up.
23. Demings tells us that the State and Defense Departments, the Vice President, and the Office of Management and Budget have still not produced a single document in response to their 71 requests, five of which are subpoenas. So the argument of waiting for the courts to straighten this out is ridiculous on its face.
24. Schiff closes by saying that what Trump did is what our founders feared most—inviting foreign interference in our elections. He accuses Trump of putting his personal benefit over national security.
25. Schiff warns that if Trump isn’t removed, “the balance of power that our founders set out will never be the same.”
26. If you haven’t heard them, Schiff’s closing caused even Republicans to commend him. They’re worth a listen.

• • One of his most quoted lines is, “Why would anyone in their right mind believe Rudy Giuliani over [FBI Director] Christopher Wray?”

Trump’s Defense Arguments:

1. Trump’s legal team starts their arguments with only two hours on Saturday, so there’s more to come in next week’s recap.
2. They begin by working to cast doubt on the House managers’ case that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and Ukraine interference in the 2016 elections in return for things of value—withholding aid and a White House meeting.
3. They refer frequently to the transcript (which is actually a summary, not a direct rendering of the call).
4. Here’s the gist of their argument:

• • There was nothing wrong with the call, and no meetings or withholding money were discussed. (The articles of impeachment don’t actually center on the call, though, they center on activities before and after.)
  • Democrats are trying to rig the election against Trump. They’ve always been trying to get rid of him.
  • Trump had valid reasons for withholding the aid. They don’t address that the DOD did certify Ukraine as compliant on fighting corruption.
  • House managers overlooked facts and didn’t speak to people with direct contact with Trump on the matter.
  • House managers haven’t met the burden of proof.
  • Zelensky himself said he didn’t feel any pressure.
  • Democrats want to overturn the election. They don’t mention that Pence, who was elected alongside Trump, would be president if Trump is removed.
  • It was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in our elections.
  • Biden tried to get the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma fired. (Except that prosecutor wasn’t investigating Burisma.)

5. The defense brings up Schiff’s paraphrasing of the call in a hearing. They leave out the part where Schiff says he’s paraphrasing.
6. The defense kind of made a case for allowing new witnesses and evidence.

More Documents Released:

1. The Office of Management and Budget releases another bunch of documents about the Ukraine aid, as required by a FOIA request.

• • The documents include email threads from late June, after an article about military aid to Ukraine appeared in the Washington Times.
  • Some are between the OMB’s Michael Duffey and Mark Sandy (Sandy testified in the House hearings).
  • They were figuring out the details of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a defense program for allocating money to Ukraine.
  • Remember Sandy testified that he learned in a July 12 email that Trump was directing the hold on aid, but he didn’t get a reason until September.

2. Emails with Pentagon officials who were questioning the legality of the freeze are heavily redacted.

More Trouble for Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani:

1. Oh lordy, there are tapes. Among Lev Parnas’s evidence released to the House is an hour-plus audio recording of Trump dining with a group of political donors, Parnas, Fruman, and others. The dinner took place on April 30, 2018.

• • We can hear Parnas say that Marie Yovanovitch was saying that Trump would be impeached so we needed to get her out of there. Trump responds with, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”
  • Parnas says Yovanovitch was left over from the Clinton administration, but she’s actually served since Reagan.
  • The recording highlights how inane dinner conversation can be.
  • One of the donors is a Canadian steel magnate who funneled money through his U.S. subsidies to donate to Trump. Which is perfectly legal.
  • This shows that the effort by Parnas and Giuliani to oust Yovanovitch went on for at least a year.

2. Trump continues to tell us he doesn’t know Parnas.
3. Giuliani promises he’ll release evidence to take down the Bidens this week. He goes on Fox & Friends to promote it.

• • It turns out it’s just a ploy to get ears on his new podcast.
  • He gives no evidence on his podcast, but on F&F he accuses Biden of taking multiple bribes totaling $8 million, and he accuses Democrats of collusion and profiteering. He says the crimes are shocking, including a poisoning.
  • Giuliani says that starting at noon on Friday, he would be rolling out his case. By the end of the week, it doesn’t sound like he’s got anything.

4. Parnas requests that Bill Barr recuse himself from the investigation of Parnas’s possible violations of election finance laws. He says Barr knew everything Parnas was working on with regard to Ukraine and they were basically on the same team.

Polls:

1. 75% of Americans want new evidence and testimony to be allowed in the impeachment trial.
2. A Pew Research poll finds that 63% of Americans think Trump has acted illegally. 51% think he should be removed from office.