That crash you heard was the sound of Donald Trump’s Ukrainegate defense, which was already looking very fragile, shattering into pieces. For the past six weeks or so, the White House and congressional Republicans have been insisting, contrary to all the evidence, that Trump—even as he asked the President of Ukraine to open politically sensitive investigations, including one involving the Biden family—didn’t back up this request with a threat to suspend vital U.S. military aid. In the messaging lexicon of Trump et al., “No quid pro quo” had replaced “No collusion.”

Given all the information contained in the anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint, which first brought the Ukraine story to light, and the depositions that were subsequently provided to Congress by career diplomats, such as William Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch, this Presidential claim of innocence was highly contentious, to say the least. But it gave Trump’s Republican enablers something to parrot when they went on cable-news shows. In the following weeks, they even refined the story a bit to suggest that, even if Trump had wanted to put the squeeze on the Ukrainians by suspending U.S. aid, the government in Kiev never learned about this, so it’s all much ado about nothing.

Enter Gordon Sondland—the Seattle hotelier and Trump donor who serves as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, a position from which he somehow emerged as the diplomatic point man in the Ukraine mess—and Kurt Volker, a career Foreign Service officer who served as the U.S. permanent representative to NATO a decade ago and returned to public service in 2017, as the State Department’s special representative for Ukraine. When Sondland testified last month, he said that earlier this year Trump had ordered him and other diplomats to work with Rudy Giuliani, the progenitor of the Ukraine caper, but that he “did not understand until much later” the real nature of the escapade; he also claimed that Trump had assured him that there was no quid pro quo. Volker, in his opening statement to congressional investigators last month, conceded that he had been concerned that “a negative narrative about Ukraine” was reaching Trump, but he also insisted that “at no time was I aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden.”

On Tuesday, the House Democrats released some revised testimony from Sondland, in which he claimed that statements from other officials, including Taylor, had “refreshed” his memory. One of the things that Sondland remembered was a September 1st conversation with Andriy Yermak, a key adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, in which he told Yermak that “the resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”

So much for the Ukrainian government not getting the message. But what was the nature of the “anti-corruption statement” that Sondland and other Trump cronies were demanding? While maintaining a straight face, the President’s apologists have suggested that he was concerned about generalized graft in the former Soviet republic and that what he wanted from Zelensky was an over-all commitment to clean up the country, rather than dirt on Hunter Biden and his work for the Ukrainian company Burisma, or on any Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. Even some Trump supporters would privately concede that the notion of the current President as a good-government type isn’t exactly credible, but it was apparently the best line that the White House could come up with. Unfortunately for Trump, there is now documented evidence that contradicts it.

Among the materials that the House Democrats released on Tuesday were a pair of text messages that Volker sent to Yermak on August 13th, a couple of weeks after Trump had spoken on the phone with Zelensky. In these messages, Volker told Yermak precisely what the Ukrainian President should say in his public statement about starting a corruption investigation. This is some of the language that Volker suggested for Zelensky:

“Special attention should be paid to the problem of interference in the political processes of the United States, especially with the alleged involvement of some Ukrainian politicians. I want to declare that this is unacceptable. We intend to initiate and complete a transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes, including those involving Burisma and the 2016 U.S. elections, which in turn will prevent the recurrence of this problem in the future.”

What will the White House do now that its cover story has been blown from inside? Predictably enough, its immediate reaction was to claim that black is white. The newly released transcripts “show there is even less evidence for this illegitimate impeachment sham than previously thought,” Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.

A possible fallback strategy that I have long expected Team Trump to adopt at some stage is to make the argument that, although what Trump and Giuliani were up to in Ukraine doesn’t look good, it wasn’t an impeachable offense, or any criminal offense at all. In some offhand comments that he made to reporters last month, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, appeared to preview this strategy, although he subsequently backed away from it.

Unfortunately for the Trump camp, Sondland also undercut this line of defense. The squeeze on Kiev, he said, began with discussions of getting the Ukrainians to “give a statement about corruption. And then, no, corruption isn’t enough, we need to talk about the 2016 election and the Burisma investigations.” A Democratic staffer asked Sondland if he believed that pressing the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens and involving “Ukrainians directly or indirectly in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign” would be illegal. Sondland responded, “I’m not a lawyer, but I assume so.”