So far, I would say Chairman Schiff has done a good job at putting Senate Republicans on trial. As I’ve suggested previously, I don’t expect this will shift their views. But it will put their participation in this cover-up in stark relief. And that is a story for the November election.

I’m going to be doing running updates in our staff blog with my colleagues. But here’s one nugget I wanted to share with you here. It really captures the whole story. The President’s lawyer Pat Cipollone says that all the evidence will show that “the President has done absolutely nothing wrong.” In other words, there’s no argument here that this hasn’t met some threshold or that there’s some shortcoming in evidence. The argument is that everything we’ve learned is completely fine.

"the president has done absolutely nothing wrong." … that pretty much says it all. pic.twitter.com/Hv4zeYy4SC

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 21, 2020

The TPM team is busy live-blogging as the impeachment trial gets underway in the Senate. Follow every twist and turn with us here.

The Senate impeachment trial will officially begin this afternoon with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) officially placing his rules for the trial on the Senate floor. The rules are designed to push the proceedings through the upper chamber quickly, with each side getting just 24 hours to make their opening arguments within two calendar days. McConnell is also barring any House evidence from entering the record automatically — everything must be approved by vote.

You’ve probably now read about Mitch McConnell’s cover-up plan for a Senate impeachment trial. It’s outrageous and Democrats should fight it tooth and nail. But this is an important moment to remember just who is on trial. President Trump is obviously guilty. The President’s trial briefs concede as much — stating baldly the none of the alleged offenses are impeachable even if proven. It’s always been Senate Republicans who are on trial.

We know what Trump did. What remains to be seen is whether Senate Republicans will back his behavior. Monday evening we got a big part of the answer.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s resolution establishing the rules of the road for the impeachment trial is just out, and it’s a doozy.

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Tomorrow, an hour before the impeachment trial gets started in the Senate, join Josh Marshall, Josh Kovensky and Matt Shuham in TPM’s New York office for a briefing on what to expect and a look back at the new evidence against the president that emerged last week through congressional document dumps and Lev Parnas’ media tour.

Click here to register and join us on Tuesday at 12 p.m. EST.

This isn’t new news. But I at least had not really put the two things together until this afternoon. Remember back last summer ABC’s George Stephanopoulos did a White House interview with President Trump. It got a lot of attention because of a number of things the President said. But the biggest was the President saying that he would in fact work with a foreign government again trying to intervene in a US election. Even Trump’s staunchest allies and toadies had a hard time defending the comment.

“It’s not an interference, they have information — I think I’d take it,” Trump told Stephanopoulos. “If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI — if I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’ The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it. When you go and talk, honestly, to congressman, they all do it, they always have, and that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.”

I know that I am not the only person who felt uneasy about the spectacle that took place last night on television as The New York Times’ editors sat around a table deciding who us peons should support for the Democratic nomination for president. Let me try to explain why I felt uneasy. Read More

I updated you last night on the latest Parnas document dump. They are hard to make sense of – particularly the new information about apparent surveillance of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. So now that I have a better understanding of the details I wanted to walk you through them. They’re important.

On the first round we got those WhatsApp text messages from Robert Hyde to Lev Parnas, apparently passing on updates about surveillance he was running on Yovanovitch. We later learned that Hyde has a history of erratic behavior and was actually involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility a month or so after the texts were sent. So we had to consider the possibility that these claims were simply made up, wildly embellished or even the product of delusions.

Last night’s document dump makes clear that there was at least some truth to the claim Ambassador Yovanovitch was being surveilled by some group of feral Trumpers.