Month: October 2019

My Salon column this morning:

25th Amendment watch

by digby

Just a little bit o’ cray-cray.

Here’s a new example via CNN’s Daniel Dale. Bloomberg published the text of Trump’s remarks last week to US diplomats and invited guests in NYC. In his remarks, Trump claimed the media buried the news of GOP candidate Dan Bishop’s special election victory last month: 

“In fact, the whole night, CNN, who had built the most beautiful, $2 million maybe they spent — no wonder they’re losing their ass. They have no ratings and they’re building studios all over the place but they had a studio, the studio was going to stay up for weeks and toward the end of the night they were taking it down. Their so-called stars were leaving. They had stars. There’s not many stars, I’ll tell you, less than 10. But they were taking—the stars were leaving. And, uh, they didn’t want to report it. But the candidate, Dan Bishop, won—by a lot.”

Bishop only won by 2 points, but here’s the bigger point: CNN never built a studio for NC-9 coverage. None of the other networks did either. The claim is nonsensical. And yet he went into great detail about something that never happened.

This is pathological. It’s sick.

Speaking louder in code
by Tom Sullivan

Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates … He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders, he speaks in a code.
— Michael Cohen testimony before House Oversight Committee, Feb. 27, 2019

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Tuesday to issue an emergency order to the White House to preserve all records of President Donald J. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders. The request is part of ongoing litigation begun before recent revelations about Trump’s July 25 call with the president of Ukraine.

The action comes in the wake of revelations in the whistleblower complain that records of that conversation and possibly others (including Trump’s May 10, 2017 Oval Office meeting with Russian officials) were moved to a restricted computer system. Dahlia Lithwick speculates a May 10 memorandum may have been concealed there from former special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation.

Zoe Tillman reports for BuzzFeed:

At a court hearing later in the day, a Justice Department lawyer told the judge that she couldn’t immediately commit to assuring that the administration would preserve records of all of Trump’s conversations, as well as other records about how the administration had handled those documents. The judge gave the government until Wednesday afternoon to make a decision.

Jackson, who sits in Washington, DC, has strongly and repeatedly suggested that the government should consider giving a voluntary assurance, as opposed to having her formally rule on the request filed by the challengers for an emergency order and issue a decision that she said one side “might not appreciate.”

Justice Department lawyer Kathryn Wyer would not give that assurance. Even voluntarily.

The Presidential Records Act passed in the wake of Watergate requires the President to send all official memos, letters, emails, etc., to the National Archives for preservation. Politico reported in June that Solomon Lartey, a records management analyst with 30 years’ experience, found himself being paid $65,969 per year to tape back together scraps of paper the President had torn up and thrown in the trash or on the floor. Those are the documents he doesn’t care about.

CREW and Congress are more worried about preservation of other documents that might implicate him in crimes. The man who “speaks in code” may not have to directly order his people to destroy anything.

The acting president has no clue how the U.S. Constitution or federal laws work, nor any interest in learning despite these tweets Tuesday evening.

….People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Has he learned extorting personal favors from foreign governments is illegal?

Has he learned destroying public records is illegal?

Has he learned it’s illegal to use government resources for his reelection campaign?

Has he learned he can’t stop impeachment by siccing his attorneys on Congress?

No, no, no, and no.

The acting president is still running the Trump Corporation, now with deeper resources and longer reach. Plus, millions of Twitter followers to whom he can speak in code.

….the Whistleblower, and also the person who gave all of the false information to him. This is simply about a phone conversation that could not have been nicer, warmer, or better. No pressure at all (as confirmed by Ukrainian Pres.). It is just another Democrat Hoax!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Whistleblowers’ anonymity is protected by federal statutes the president is obliged to uphold. Thus, Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called this and Trump’s other Twitter attacks on the whistleblower “outrageous.” Warner said in a Tuesday statement:

“It is deeply disturbing that the president went on national television and told the American people that he’s trying to find out the whistleblower’s identity. The president’s comments about ‘spies and treason’ and ‘what we used to do in the old days’ are downright dangerous and will do serious damage to our national security long after this news cycle is over. That kind of rhetoric can only serve one purpose: intimidation of this whistleblower and anyone else within the intelligence community who is considering stepping forward to report wrongdoing.

“It is incumbent upon the Acting Director of National Intelligence and other intelligence leaders to publicly pledge that they will protect and stand by this whistleblower, and any other individual within the intelligence community who steps forward to lawfully report illegal or unethical behavior within the federal government, anonymously or otherwise.”

The whistleblower needs protection from anyone reading the code in Trump’s Twitter stream:

Andrew Bakaj, an attorney for the whistleblower, writes that “the events of the past week have heightened our concerns that our client’s identity will be disclosed publicly and that, as a result, our client will be put in harm’s way.” Bakaj also claimed that “certain individuals have issued a $50,000 “bounty” for “any information” relating to our client’s identity.”

Members of Congress leading the impeachment inquiry may themselves require protection.

Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges for fraudulently making up a statement and reading it to Congress as if this statement, which was very dishonest and bad for me, was directly made by the President of the United States? This should never be allowed!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

Yesterday, I posted an image from “Titanic” to illustrate what might be ahead for the Trump administration. Joel Mathis at The Week concurs that Ukraine may be just “tip of the impeachment iceberg.” Or the first of many shoes to drop.

The shit is coming down. Urgently.

by digby

This is getting real:

The State Department’s inspector general is expected to give an “urgent” briefing to staffers from several House and Senate committees on Wednesday afternoon about documents obtained from the department’s Office of the Legal Adviser related to the State Department and Ukraine, sources familiar with the planned briefing told ABC News.

Details of the briefing, requested by Steve Linick, the inspector general at State, remain unknown. Linick is expected to meet with congressional staff in a secure location on Capitol Hill.

The unusual nature and timing of the briefing – during a congressional recess – suggests it may be connected to a recent intelligence community whistleblower allegation which describes, in part, the State Department’s role in coordinating interactions between Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, and Ukrainian officials.

The State Department has faced criticism in recent weeks for connecting Giuliani to multiple Ukrainian officials about re-opening an investigation into for Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

The State Department’s press office and the State Department’s inspector general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The committees expected to be part of the briefing did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

I can’t even guess what this might be. BUt the fact that it’s “urgent” suggests that the IG is concerned about something that is happening right this minute. It has to do with Ukraine.

Who knows? But it’s very, very curious.

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The president is a bloodthirsty tyrant

by digby

The New York Times:

The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

These were unarmed people seeking asylum.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised considering he ran for office promising the torture and behead terrorist suspects but kee[ in mind that these people were unarmed asylum seekers. He is a racist psychopath.

“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, around-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,” he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff.

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. She had always been viewed with suspicion by the president, who told aides she was “a Bushie,” and part of the “deep state” who once contributed to a group that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn.

That March day, he was furious at Mr. Pompeo, too, for having cut a deal with Mexico to allow the United States to reject some asylum seekers — a plan Mr. Trump said was clearly failing.

A complete shutdown of the border, Mr. Trump said, was the only way.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. Even Mr. Kushner, who had developed relationships with Mexican officials and now sided with Ms. Nielsen, could not get through to him.

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.”

Read the whole thing. It will make your blood curdle. This is a sick and twisted person.

And, by the way, it’s pretty clear that Kirstjen Nielsen is talking. Better late than never, I suppose.

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They warned us

by digby

Karen Tumulty tells it like it is in this column:

James Madison warned us that somebody as reckless as Donald Trump might come along.

Twice in recent days, Trump has called for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to be hauled in for treason, which is punishable by death. Schiff’s crime? At a hearing last week, the Intelligence Committee chairman read a parody of Trump’s now-infamous telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The humor, unsurprisingly, was lost on someone with an exaggerated sense of victimhood and an ego made of eggshells. Trump rage-tweeted Sunday that Schiff’s “lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason….. .” On Monday morning, Trump upped that outrageous demand by suggesting that Schiff actually be arrested for treason.

It has become so easy to dismiss such comments as hyperbole and bluster — just Trump being Trump — that we risk losing sight of how dangerous, how fundamentally un-American they are.

The framers of the Constitution took great care in spelling out what acts could be regarded as treason, which was the only crime they explicitly defined. Article III, Section 3 states that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Why did the framers believe treason, alone among offenses, merited such clarity in the nation’s founding document? Their recent history had given them reason to fear authoritarians who would loosely throw around accusations of treason. The parameters of the crime under British law were broad and vague, and could be stretched to include counterfeiting or sleeping with a member of the royal family, says Jason Opal, a professor of American history at McGill University. The royal governors of the 13 colonies invoked treason as a handy means of crushing dissent and executing those who objected to the crown’s rule.

When the framers set out to devise a legal system for the new nation, they borrowed much from British law and traditions. But they felt strongly that “treason” should have a precise, fixed and uniquely American meaning. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43: “As new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime.”

The president, as he is showing us, is the “alternate malignity” that Madison feared. Trump took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He should start by learning what is in it.

“Alternate Malignity” is an excellent phrase. In modern parlance we would say “unfit imbecile.”

The big question is why tens of millions worship him like a God and 99% of elected Republicans back him to the hilt.

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Frightening would-be terrorists talking about civil war

by digby

Expert on right wing violence, Dave Neiwert, reports at Crooks and Liars on this “civil war” talk being pushed by our president. It will send a chill down your spine. An excerpt:

Civil war has become an endemic talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits. Only this week, longtime Republican operative Joseph diGenova went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and warned:

We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats, one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left—they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.

This seemingly hysterical pronouncement, in fact, is fast becoming a commonplace among right-wing pundits. (Watch for it to become a permanent talking point at Fox.) That’s because it has been circulating on the right for a good long while now, and is now being whipped up to new heights—notably, well into the mainstream of conservative-movement discourse.
[…]
Even before Trump’s election, talk of civil war was bubbling up with great frequency among far-right militiamen who believed a Hillary Clinton presidency would bring about a fresh kind of “tyranny,” many of whom prepared for armed resistance in the event she won. Indeed, the talk has cropped up in other recent domestic-terrorism incidents: Three Kansas militiamen arrested in October 2016 for plotting the truck bombing of a rural community of Somali refugees were acting under the assumption that Clinton would win, and were planning to act the day after the November election as an opening act of resistance to her administration.

And like so many components of right-wing Republicanism in the age of Trump, the idea of civil war—indeed, the agitation and outright fantasizing in hopes of one—has its origins in the racist radical Right of the 1980s and ‘90s. Those roots remain embedded in the violent reactionarism fueling the militias and hate groups that sprang to life during the Obama years as a backlash to the election of America’s first black president. And they are very much alive in the pro-Trump authoritarianism of the president’s most rabid and violent defenders, people such as Cesar Sayoc and Christopher Hasson.

I’ve been following the strands of right-wing civil war rhetoric since those 1980s origins, having been involved in coverage of the Aryan Nations and The Order in northern Idaho at the time. I’ve written whole books on the subject. However, rather than explaining the dynamics in text alone, I thought it might be better to show people this history rather than simply to tell it. After all, so much of the spread of the radical Right—and particularly the post-Obama alt-right—has occurred in the video realm.

Most, if not all, of the conspiracy theories that fuel the radical Right today have been spread in videos viewed online, by increasingly younger audiences. The progenitors of these videos have successfully created an epistemological bubble, a kind of alternative universe that has taken on a life of its own. (I call that bubble Alt-America.)

He goes on to show four videos which trace the rise of violent right wing rhetoric and provides context and historical data for all of it. It’s unsettling to say the least. Well worth clicking over to read and watch all of it.

I’ll just put these two videos up to whet your appetite:

Maybe in a more innocent time we might chalk this up to a bunch of blowhards playing soldier. I don’t know about you, but I feel as if something has shifted. I think we should be aware of this and understand that tens of millions of our fellow Americans watch and absorb this stuff every day. The vast majority will not be violent. But it only takes a few to start the fire.

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“This should be allowed! Whaaa!!!

by digby

Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges for fraudulently making up a statement and reading it to Congress as if this statement, which was very dishonest and bad for me, was directly made by the President of the United States? This should never be allowed!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Normally, presidents have at least a rudimentary understanding of the constitution. This one, of course, does not and even if he did he doesn’t care what it says.

But just for the record:

The Constitution says that: “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place”

Trump often say things “shouldn’t be allowed” such as “hillary Clinton should never have been allowed to run for president.” It’s not that he has no respect for the constitution or the principles underlying it, he has no clue about it at all. He simplistically sees everything in life from the perspective of a whining, angry playground bully.

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More fringies on the radar

by digby

This scandal is so baroque at this point I’ve got a headache. I suspect that may be the point:

Just days after launching an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives issued a subpoena to Rudy Giuliani and letters demanding information from key figures behind a campaign in Ukraine to discredit the president’s chief rival, Joe Biden.

The move to secure critical documents — including financial records — from the president’s personal lawyer and three other men represents the first effort by Congress to uncover details of the brazen effort to pressure leaders in Ukraine to investigate the former vice-president and his son Hunter in the months leading to the 2020 campaign.

“A growing public record including your own statements indicates that the president, you and others, appear to have pressed the Ukrainian government to pursue two politically motivated investigations,” said the letter to Giuliani, signed by the Democratic chairs of three House committees.

Letters were sent to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Ukrainian-American business partners who arranged the meetings between Giuliani and top Ukrainian prosecutors over the last year during a secret campaign that has now thrust another foreign country into the middle of a presidential race.

Another letter was sent to Semyon “Sam” Kislin, a Ukrainian-born businessman who once served on a New York City economic advisory council when Giuliani was mayor. In an interview, Kislin claimed not to know all of the men he was named alongside, but agreed to appear before the House. He said he had been planning on traveling to Ukraine following Yom Kippur, but may have to change his plans: “A subpoena is a subpoena, if they call I’ll have to go.”

The letters asked all three men to give depositions in October and warned that Congress could “pursue alternative means to obtain the information” if they do not comply.

These people are con artists. Of course.

A joint investigation by BuzzFeed News and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in July found that, under Giuliani’s direction, Parnas and Fruman carried out a whirlwind campaign to unearth information to damage Biden’s candidacy and press Ukraine prosecutors to investigate accusations that Ukrainian agents plotted to rig the 2016 election to favor Hillary Clinton by leaking evidence against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in what became a cornerstone of the Mueller investigation.

Parnas and Fruman traveled to Kiev, New York, Warsaw and Paris to meet with Ukrainian leaders, raising questions among legal experts about whether they were blurring the lines of what US citizens are allowed to do without registering as foreign agents.

The intelligence committee is demanding that Parnas and Fruman — investors with troubled financial histories — turn over the source of any funds into a joint company they own and disclose whether the money originated abroad.

The committee also demanded records of the sources of hundreds of thousands of dollars the men collectively contributed to GOP political campaigns last year, including $325,000 from a company they own to America First Action, a Super PAC supporting candidates loyal to Trump.

Parnas, who has dined with the president in Washington, could not be reached last night, but in a previous interview with BuzzFeed News said he was not getting any money to carry out the campaign.

“All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information was coming to us — either I bury it or pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on.”

This is what happens when you brainwash large numbers of the population and empower lunatics.

It gets crazier and crazier.

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Impeachment advice worth listening to

by digby

Over the past couple of years I’ve read a bunch of books and watched a bunch of documentaries about Watergate. I was a teenager at the time and I avidly watched it unfold. But it was a long time ago and I hadn’t realized how little I really knew of the details until I took an in-depth look back at it.

Elizabeth Drew wrote what is in my opinion the best real time book on the subject:

If you haven’t read it or want to refresh your memory, I highly recommend you read it. She has, of course, had an illustrious career beyond that and she’s extremely insightful about Washington politics generally. Democrats should read her op-ed in the New York Times today:

House Democratic leaders, following frustrated efforts to hold President Trump to account, understandably want to strike quickly to impeach him on the grounds of one extremely serious issue: his pressuring the president of Ukraine to get the goods on his Democratic rival Joe Biden. But they’re risking making their target too narrow and moving too fast.

In so doing they could end up implicitly bestowing approval on other presidential acts that amount to a long train of abuses of power. And going too quickly could shut off the oxygen that might fuel Republican acceptance that it’s time to break with Mr. Trump — perhaps enough of them to end his presidency.

To limit the impeachment process to the most blatant presidential misdeed yet discovered would leave in the dust — unresolved for history, setting dangerous precedents — the possibility of holding accountable a president who routinely enriches himself at the expense of the taxpayers and flouts the Constitution’s emoluments clause, lies so persistently that we’re far from the democratic concept of transparent government, usurps the role of Congress by unilaterally holding up funds or using them for other purposes than it has approved, bullies private businesses by threatening a tax increase or a significant raise in postal rates (as Mr. Trump did to Amazon, whose owner also owns The Washington Post), tells intelligence alumni who openly criticize him that he’ll suspend their security clearances and fights the law that allows Congress to obtain his tax returns.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a master strategist, has said that these issues can be taken up later. With respect, if a president were to be impeached more than once, what is the meaning of impeachment? Will Republican senators be willing to vote to eject Mr. Trump from the presidency, which is what the Senate trial is about, on the basis of one issue, no matter how repellent?

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I suggest taking other issues into account, without going into detail, in a second article of impeachment that would accompany the one centering on Ukraine. This might resemble the second of the three articles against Richard Nixon drawn up in 1974 by the House Judiciary Committee. Article II held Nixon accountable for a collection of abuses of power and also, significantly, for the acts of his subordinates in pursuit of his untoward goals. A third article could cover Mr. Trump’s serial obstructions of legitimate attempts to investigate his administration’s alleged misdeeds.

Some other questions won’t be resolved for a while. For example, one very large subject that is the poison ivy that pervades Mr. Trump’s presidency: the role of Russia. It was also in Russia’s interest that Mr. Trump hold up military assistance to Ukraine for its war against Mr. Trump’s friend President Vladimir Putin. Another is the extent to which Mr. Trump’s foreign policy has been guided by favoritism toward the leaders of other countries (several of them autocrats) where his private company has been able to do business, putting up hotels and such.

Speaker Pelosi and her allies argue that a narrow, Ukraine-based impeachment agenda is more likely to attract wider public support than a collection of grievances because it “is easier for the public to understand.” They’re spooked by the failure of the report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to galvanize public opinion, but there are several reasons for that, including that Mr. Mueller, bogged down in legalisms, didn’t try.

In fact, a speedily adopted Ukraine-based impeachment might repel possible Republican supporters. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, urges that the drafters of even just a Ukraine article take their time. “Speed is less important than professional thoroughness,” he says. “A well-prepared case could assure all Democratic votes and get Republican votes in the Senate. The atmosphere there now is too partisan for that.”

The almost universally held assumption that Senate Republicans will never vote to convict Mr. Trump is subject to question. It’s based on the same kind of thinking that has accompanied the question of holding Mr. Trump to account all along: projecting from stasis — that is, assuming that how the public and the politicians respond to an issue at the moment is how they always will.

For months this year we were told that “the public isn’t interested.” This assumption doesn’t allow for new developments or for individuals to see things in a different light. Within three days in the past tumultuous week, public opinion as measured in a Morning Consult poll swung a head-snapping 13 points in favor of an impeachment process.

Some Republicans whose principal election fear used to be of being “primaried” are beginning to worry more about running with Mr. Trump. They’d prefer not to be associated with parts of his agenda or his increasingly erratic behavior. Though the 2018 midterms wiped out numerous leaning-to-center Republicans, there are signs of Republican discontent with Mr. Trump’s conduct with Ukraine.

Yet the usual small group of House Republicans is being obstreperous, and in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, who’s also the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has gone the furthest of Republicans in attacking the impeachment inquiry.

He has heatedly called the investigation “a sham” and “a political set-up,” charging that the whistle-blower’s version of the conversation that’s at the heart of the matter didn’t match the notes of the conversation released by the White House (the differences could only be technical). He has insisted that Mr. Trump’s pressing for “a favor” from Ukraine’s neophyte president wasn’t a quid pro quo, which it obviously was because it followed directly the Ukraine president’s request for the military aid that Congress had approved.

But most Republicans remain silent. Many of them know that Mr. Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine is indefensible. And they’re aware that damning new disclosures can burst upon them anytime. A Senate Democrat with friends across the aisle (it happens) described his Republican colleagues as “nervous as hell.”

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the one-man roadblock, behaved most unusually, for him, last week. First, he allowed Senate adoption of a unanimous consent request sponsored by the Democrats that the text of the whistle-blower’s complaint be released to Congress, as required by law. (The administration had cooked up excuses to not release it.) Mr. McConnell also said that if the House voted to impeach the president, the Senate would have “no choice” but to hold a trial.

If two-thirds of the senators, which would require 20 Republicans, voted to convict, Mr. Trump would have to surrender the presidency. When Nixon saw this coming, he resigned. If the articles of impeachment are carefully and thoughtfully drawn, if they indicate the comprehensiveness of Mr. Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, it would be unwise to rule out anything.

But even if the president isn’t convicted, Republican votes to impeach can still count for a lot. If the managers of the impeachment drive proceed in a manner that attracts even some Republican votes — say, eight or 10, especially in the Senate — this could at least impinge on Mr. Trump’s inevitable claims that the whole thing has been a “partisan witch hunt.”