OPINION — We now have the smoking-gun summary, the most incriminating White House document since Watergate. Even with ellipses and maybe redactions for national security reasons, the reconstruction of Donald Trump’s July 25 conversation with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is chilling in its specificity.

Instead of subtly alluding to Joe Biden or hinting that a little private help might be appreciated, Trump instead bluntly instructed Zelenskiy, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

With Ukraine desperate for $391 million promised by America for secure military communications, Zelenskiy had about as much free will as a gambler in hock to loan sharks who break kneecaps. And then there was that minor matter of Trump using Attorney General Bill Barr as his middleman for delivery of would-be dirt on Biden.

Trump is so overt and inept in his plotting that if he had been president during Watergate, he probably would have called a press conference after the burglars were caught at Democratic National Committee headquarters. “Of course, I sent them,” Trump would have bragged. “The DNC has been very nasty to me. The Democrats are bad people. They got what they deserved.”

For Nancy Pelosi, this rough transcript of Trump’s investigate-or-else Ukrainian ultimatum must have felt like welcome vindication. With her dramatic turnabout on impeachment, Pelosi ran the risk that the call summary might be as murky as the Mueller report. Instead it read like the Nixon White House transcripts minus the deleted expletives.