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.

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

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

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.

More on the Saudis and the hacking of Jeff Bezos. Overshadowed for today. But if this bears out it’s a very big deal.

A very amped-up Jay Sekulow ended his argument against Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) latest amendment with a diatribe against what Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) had said about “lawyer lawsuits.” His repeated comments about “lawyer lawsuits” appeared to prompt confusion on the House managers table in the well of the chamber, where the House members are joined by lawyers who have been working on the House inquiry.

Just as the Senate impeachment trial got underway, Josh Marshall, Josh Kovensky and Matt Shuham did an Inside briefing on what to expect, and the continually mounting evidence agains the President. They discussed Lev Parnas’ recent revelations and years-long back story, and the implications for President Trump and U.S. politics more broadly if — and probably when — Senate Republicans let him off the hook.

You can watch that briefing here.

The Senate trial officially gets underway at 1 p.m., but we’re expecting pretrial motions at 9 a.m. and responses to them at 11 a.m. Follow along in our liveblog, here.

After a late night of proceedings in the Senate, in which the majority party shot down each and every one of the minority’s amendments to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) rules for the impeachment trial, we were expecting Senate Republicans to file procedural motions this morning, including a possible motion to dismiss. It’s just after 10 a.m. ET and we’ve seen nothing, meaning Senate Republicans likely lack the votes to support an outright dismissal. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following:

Everything today is impeachment. We sit here listening to Adam Schiff make the House’s opening statement. But even with that I want to flag your attention to this story about the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the hacking of Jeff Bezos’s cell phone.

At one level it is a tabloid story. Bezos’s phone was allegedly hacked and the hackers discovered evidence of an affair. Evidence was later shared with The National Enquirer. They published it. Bezos’s was embarrassed and he and his wife announced they were divorcing.

But this is a much, much bigger deal than the marital embarrassment of the richest man in the world.