Based simply on what President Trump has admitted to, combined with one piece of as-yet-uncontradicted reporting, Trump has committed impeachable offenses in his dealings with Ukraine.

To understand why, let’s do something that should be second-nature, especially to journalists, but which very few people practice anymore: Let’s analyze the situation while removing all names and all partisan and ideological affiliations. Let’s also stipulate that the targets of the president’s interest (in this case Hunter and Joe Biden) are guilty as sin. (They probably are not guilty of criminal wrongdoing, but let’s assume they are.)

We know, because (1) the president said so this weekend and (2) an uncontradicted Wall Street Journal report detailed the intensity with which the president did it, that the president of the United States urged a foreign leader to investigate U.S. citizens who are not under U.S. investigation and who are not fugitives from U.S. justice. Absent any explanations not yet known, this is bizarre.

There are times when the U.S. government intervenes in matters of foreign investigations to demand that U.S. citizens receive due process. In other words, U.S. interests are ensuring that American citizens have adequate defenses against foreign kangaroo courts. There also are times when U.S. citizens have been duly indicted in U.S. courts but have fled justice. In those cases, the U.S. government, even including the president, might press foreign governments to help extradite the U.S. fugitive.

Never in my conscious memory, though, have I heard of an American president urging a foreign nation to investigate specific U.S. citizens who were not on the lam from American law. (I welcome correction here, but either way, the examples would have to be vanishingly rare.) For this to happen, in any instance, would be outlandish, especially if there is no obvious U.S. security interest in pursuing the American targets. The president is responsible for the U.S. system of justice, not for alleged (but very vague) violations, by Americans, of foreign law.

Now add the element of the specific identity of the American citizens whom the president wants targeted. These aren’t some sort of U.S.-based international mobsters. These aren’t any of a number of American businessmen trading influence and cutting corners in international commerce. Instead, these happen to be the president’s main perceived political rival, and his son.

In short, these circumstances involve a president using the prestige of his office to urge a foreign government to harass the president’s main political rival. In such a case, it doesn’t even matter if the political rival is guilty. Even if the rival is guilty of some foreign violation, that is not a reasonable excuse for the president to use such pressure. Remember, there are so far no substantive allegations — zero, zilch, nada — that either the rival or his son broke U.S. law. The president has no authority or legitimate interest in this based on his public office; his only interest here is political, meaning to hurt his rival.

That the president’s interests in this matter are personal/political rather than legitimately public is confirmed by the extraordinary efforts made by the president’s personal, private lawyer (I'm referring to Rudy Giuliani, not Michael Cohen) to pressure the foreign government in the same direction. The lawyer has acknowledged that he regularly briefed the president on these efforts, that he used the State Department to line up his interactions with Ukraine’s president for this purpose, and that the Ukrainians offered to reopen the investigation specifically in the same conversations in which they begged for a formal meeting between the two nations’ presidents. Yet the lawyer insisted he was acting in his capacity as the U.S. president’s personal lawyer, specifically (as paraphrased by the Washington Post) to “make sure” the rival “didn’t become president without having to answer” for the alleged corruption.

Remember, both the president and his lawyer have now acknowledged the essentials of this situation. The lawyer carried on these efforts for months, while reporting to the president. The president used an Oval Office phone call to emphasize his interest — eight times, reportedly — in the case. If these reports remain uncontradicted, and barring context that makes them more palatable, this is a big deal.

Already, then, even without a suggested quid pro quo involving U.S. military assistance, what we appear to have is an entirely illegitimate mingling of the president's personal political interests with his diplomatic and law enforcement powers.

This alone would be impeachable, and far worse than anything Trump was suspected of in connection with the whole Russia-collusion business. It would represent an attempt on Trump's part to leverage the presidential office to get a personal favor from the leader of a foreign country desperately needing U.S. support against Russia. And Trump was supposedly asking this foreign leader for the personal favor of investigating American citizens not accused of violating U.S. law. Naturally, it came without any guarantee or request for due process for the American citizens involved.

Now add in the element of military assistance. The president and his lawyer say there was no direct quid pro quo. We’ll see. The president was ambivalent about assisting Ukraine and was in fact slow-walking the assistance, even though the American public, through its representatives, had specifically authorized it. Ukraine needed the assistance desperately enough that an inappropriate presidential request might have seemed like a lot more than a friendly ask.

This would be a manipulation and misuse of American aid, taxpayer-financed, for a purely political interest of the president’s. Remember, in this case the president did not release the aid again until after press reports began suggesting that the aid delay was somehow tied to the president’s political interests. He made no other substantive explanation for why the aid was now justified when a month earlier he had felt necessary to delay its delivery.

Even if the president’s rival and his son were guilty of violating Ukrainian law, all of the above-mentioned presidential behavior would be impeachable. There was no national-security interest involved in prosecuting the rivals, no readily apparent American system-of-justice interest, and no other known “reason of state” why these particular American citizens should be particularly targeted.

Finally, if the quid pro quo were explicit or directly hinted at, the case for removal would be such a slam-dunk that it should be accomplished within mere months. Either way, unless Trump convincingly walks back his own and Giuliani's remarks in the last few days confirming the broad gist of these reports, the pressure alone merits removal from office.