The Stone trial received little press compared with the barrage of news coverage that characterized the Mueller probe. As if to drive home how the news cycle had moved on, the Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann—who avoided the press during the two years of the investigation—appeared on MSNBC to provide commentary on the impeachment hearings at the same time prosecutors wrapped up their case against Stone.

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The biggest revelation that emerged from the trial came from Rick Gates, the former Trump campaign and transition official who pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud in connection to his work with the campaign chairman Paul Manafort, now serving seven years in prison. Speaking as a witness for the prosecution, Gates provided detailed testimony on how the campaign viewed Stone as its link to WikiLeaks over the course of the summer and fall of 2016—the matter on which Stone is alleged to have lied to investigators. During a car ride to LaGuardia Airport in July 2016, Gates told the jury, he witnessed then-candidate Donald Trump take a call from Roger Stone. At the end of the call, Trump told Gates that “more information would be coming.”

Trump’s closing comment to Gates, and Gates’s involvement, are set out clearly in the Mueller report itself. But until Gates’s testimony, the question of whom Trump spoke with on the phone remained hidden behind black redaction bars. The testimony is damaging to Trump both because it’s evidence that the candidate himself was aware of and encouraging Stone’s role as an intermediary with WikiLeaks, and because it suggests Trump played very fast and loose with the truth in his written answers to questions from Mueller’s team: As the Mueller report shows, Trump wrote that he had “no recollection” of any conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

The bombshell that dropped on Wednesday’s first day of impeachment hearings involved a call, too. Ambassador William Taylor, now serving as the lead U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, informed Congress that a staffer had overheard Trump asking about “the investigations” during a phone call with Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who has been fingered as one of the main figures in the Ukraine extortion effort. Like Gates’s testimony, Taylor’s links Trump directly to the scandal from which congressional Republicans have sought to exonerate him.

On one level, this is appalling—as Taylor clearly understood it to be. To state the obvious, the president of the United States should not be involved in a shakedown effort with a foreign leader for personal political gain. On another level, though, it’s entirely predictable. This is, as former FBI Director James Comey put it, “the nature of the person.” The president lies and misleads—about his involvement with Stone and WikiLeaks; about what he did or didn’t demand from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; about anything and everything. He uses any weapon he can against his perceived opponents—including material provided by Russian military intelligence, not to mention the apparatus of the American state. He puts his own interests above those of the country—in fact, he may not even understand what it would mean to prioritize the interests of his country over his own. From the Russia investigation to what Representative Devin Nunes called, somewhat rudely, “the low-rent Ukrainian sequel,” the pattern is the same.