This time last year, Washington DC was crippled by the longest US Government shutdown in history, prompted by President Donald Trump's demand for $US5.7 billion ($8.2 billion) to build his US-Mexico border wall and the Congressional refusal to hand it over.

The five-week impasse saw museums and national parks locked up over the holiday season, public servants forced to take out loans to feed their families and even several FBI investigations compromised.

This festive season, another politically motivated stalemate has gripped the capital: the President's impeachment trial, or more precisely, the possible lack thereof.

Washington's moves and countermoves

This time last year, the focus was on the Government shutdown. ( Reuters: Jason Reed )

After the House (the US equivalent of Australia's House of Representatives) voted to impeach Donald Trump for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress, the expectation was that the documentation outlining the articles, or charges, would be swiftly sent to the Senate, so the trial over whether to remove him from office could take place in January.

Mr Trump's Republican allies in the Senate were preparing to give the charges short shrift, openly stating they didn't need to call a single witness and promising to vote against a White House eviction, regardless of what was (or wasn't) presented as evidence.

They'd made up their minds to acquit the President of the impeachment charges, in the hope that would exonerate him of any wrongdoing, without the need to risk any new evidence coming to the surface.

But the Speaker of the Democrat-controlled House had a Joker up her sleeve.

Nancy Pelosi revealed she was breaking with convention by withholding the impeachment articles, until the House and the Senate could agree on procedures for a "fair trial".

The Democrats are using the delay to leverage their opponents into calling new witnesses and documents, in the hope it would hurt the President ahead of next year's election.

Nancy Pelosi had a Joker up her sleeve. ( AP: J. Scott Applewhite )

By their calculation, even if the gambit fails and the stalemate continues, at least Mr Trump won't be able to claim vindication in the Senate.

"President Trump blocked his own witnesses and documents from the House, and from the American people, on phony complaints about the House process," Ms Pelosi tweeted.

"What is his excuse now?"

Ever since the first whiff of impeachment months ago, Democrats have been playing a fairly straight bat.

Now they've flicked the switch to raw politics.

And the Republicans, who themselves openly stated they weren't even pretending to be impartial, are now screaming blue murder.

"What right does Crazy Nancy have to hold up this Senate trial. None! She has a bad case and would rather not have a negative decision …" Mr Trump tweeted.

Republican leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsay Graham also responded on Twitter:

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Republicans have moved a little… but so did Comey

Quite a bit has unfolded in Washington in the last few weeks. ( Reuters: Tom Brenner )

From a position of not needing to call a single witness, Republicans are now suggesting Mr Trump needs to be given the opportunity to defend himself, although no-one believes the President would even consider actually taking the stand.

In the meantime, new evidence has come to light.

Emails from a White House budget official show the Pentagon was ordered to freeze military funding to Ukraine just 90 minutes after Mr Trump's "do us a favour" phone call to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The White House told the Pentagon to keep the information "closely held" due to the "sensitive nature" of the directive, yet another sign Trump's top aids knew the request was politically explosive.

None of Mr Trump's supporters are buying it.

It seems the only thing that could convince Republican voters Mr Trump has done anything wrong is a secret tape of the President saying, "I am bribing you for my own personal gain".

Perhaps that's because their preferred media outlets aren't saying much about the actual evidence or the reason it's a problem for the US going forward if allowed to go unchecked.

Watching Fox News on the night Mr Trump was impeached, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was Ms Pelosi, Hunter Biden and the FBI being marched off to a Senate trial.

To be fair, the pundits on Fox had some relatively juicy new material to work with.

Largely buried in Australia under the weight of impeachment news, was a report scathing of the FBI's investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

Former FBI director James Comey addressed the Horowitz report during the week. ( AP: J. Scott Applewhite )

The Justice Department's watchdog, Michael Horowitz, found the FBI probe was dysfunctional, rushed and included numerous doctored wiretap documents.

In an interview on Fox News, fired FBI director James Comey was eventually cornered into a partial mea culpa.

"I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years," he told host Chris Wallace.

It fits perfectly with Mr Trump's claims the "deep state" was out to get him from the start.

But despite the FBI's reprehensible malpractice, the Horowitz report also declared the blunders were not driven by a vendetta against the President.

"We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced" the decision to open an investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign," the report concluded.

That is not the final word.

A tale of two reports

The Attorney-General handpicked the man to conduct the second report into the Russia inquiry. ( AP: John Bazemore, File )

A second inquiry into the origins of the Russia inquiry is being conducted by John Durham, a federal prosecutor who was hand-picked by Attorney-General William Barr, one of the President's staunchest allies.

And we already know it will reach a very different conclusion to the first report.

In the hours after the Horowitz report landed, Mr Durham released a statement of his own.

"Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector-General that we do not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened," he said.

He's essentially saying the FBI should not have opened the investigation into Mr Trump's campaign, based on the evidence it had at the time — a very different conclusion to Horowitz.

In Trump's America, even supposedly impartial public servants are splitting down party lines.

And that brings us back to the Senate.

A masterstroke or a swing and a miss?

What will history make of the Democrats' impeachment strategy? ( AP: J. Scott Applewhite) )

The Democrats appear to be making a clever political play in withholding the articles of impeachment.

At the very least, it seems to be getting under the President's skin, if his Twitter activity is any indication.

The problem is they can no longer attempt to claim the moral high ground.

Everyone can see it for what it is, and voters couldn't be more fed up with political games.

In years to come, the decision to withhold will either be seen as a masterstroke by Ms Pelosi or yet another air-swing by the Democrats, who have so far been outmanoeuvred on so many of their attacks against the President.

Or perhaps, swamped by ever greater outrage, it'll just become another footnote, like last year's "historic" Government shutdown.