While the president was melting down in a bilateral press conference with the President of Finland and creating a landmark event for the art form known as photography, a few other things were afoot. We learned that various groups—including one foreign government—are buying up huge numbers of rooms at Trump hotels and leaving many empty, which prompted a sitting United States congressman to say, "We're looking at near raw bribery." This appears to be merely the president's most recent—and perhaps most blatant—violation of the Emoluments Clause. We also learned, thanks to the Washington Post, that Trump has essentially co-opted the Departments of Justice and State to primarily cater to his interests and needs, rather than the public's.

The Justice Department has prioritized a probe that the president hopes will discredit a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. As part of that effort, Attorney General William P. Barr has met overseas with foreign intelligence officials to enlist their aid in “investigating the investigators,” as the right’s rallying cry goes, and dig into the president’s suspicions.

The State Department, meanwhile, has been investigating the email records of as many as 130 current and former department officials who sent messages to the private email account of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Trump’s 2016 opponent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defied Congress on Tuesday by attempting to block the depositions of five department employees called to testify in the impeachment inquiry.

Here are perhaps the two most crucial departments of the Executive Branch, meant to serve the American public, converted into instruments of the president's personal will. The task given to each is legitimately insane.

Trump berates a reporter during yesterday’s Totally Normal presser. Getty Images

First, the Justice Department is trying to disprove—or at least muddy the waters around—the established fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win. This is completely nuts based on the volume of evidence to this effect compiled in the Mueller Report alone, but it's also nuts because Trump Junior released his own emails indicating the Trump campaign knew this was true back in June of 2016. The middleman told Junior that the dirt the Kremlin-connected lawyer was offering on Clinton was "very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." They have always known it was true, but the president has now corrupted the independent system of justice in this country to convince the public it isn't.

Second, the State Department has been weaponized to breathe new life into the goddamn Clinton Email "Scandal." The idea that we are still talking about Clinton's email protocol in the Year of Our Lord 2019 makes me want to strap myself to a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile. (Oh, and that's something the State Department might concern itself with instead of this crap.) No one cares about the email protocol, least of all the Trumpists. You can tell because they systematically used private email for official government business when they entered office. Ivanka Trump was just one of many, and she had the fucking nerve to pretend she didn't know it was a problem after her daddy and the credulous media banged on about it for two years previous. The triumph of shamelessness. And you can add the fact that Trump now has his own Servergate to the sea of irony that threatens to drown us all.

Again, this is what two key departments of our government are up to now because the president wants it to be so. Presumably, the Treasury Department is investigating who Harriet Tubman is. And all the while, El Jefe is screaming that Shifty Schiff is the only reason anyone's worried about his Beautiful, Perfect Call with the President of Ukraine, even though his own White House released the writeup of the call. We all saw what he said. Even Mitt Romney said he was concerned. And, by the way, there's renewed scrutiny of that writeup on the basis that it left out significant portions of the conversation.

But even what's there indicates Trump pressured a foreign government to interfere in an American election, an abuse of power that subjugated the national interest to his personal political benefit. And yet we have to hear all these Republican members of Congress embarrass themselves questioning whether The Whistleblower Had a Political Bias, or falsely suggesting Schiff drafted the complaint. It doesn't matter. We all saw what Trump said on the non-transcript. This is a series of desperate distractions, and somehow Kevin McCarthy and the others can't seem to sense that they're running out of real estate.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io