Yesterday, at 12:30am, Gordon Sondland—the US ambassador to the European Union who has emerged as a key character in the ongoing Trump/Ukraine scandal—received a voicemail from an administration official telling him not to appear at a House hearing scheduled for yesterday morning. Sondland duly failed to show. (His lawyer said Sondland was “disappointed,” but obligated to follow State Department orders.) That drama, it turned out, was only an appetizer. Later in the day, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, wrote House Democrats to let them know that, henceforth, the administration will refuse to provide witnesses, documents—anything, really—that they request during their “impeachment inquiry.” (The quote marks there are Cipollone’s.)

All day long, Trump’s boosters buttressed the stone wall. The official White House Twitter account—an underappreciated vector of Trumpian propaganda—echoed Cipollone’s claim that the inquiry is unconstitutional. (The Constitution: “The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”) Rudy Giuliani compared Democrats’ efforts to the Salem witch trials and Joe McCarthy (who Giuliani seems to think was *checks notes* a Russian communist). Lowering the bar further still, Matt Gaetz, the Trump-friendly Florida Congressman, called the inquiry “a kangaroo court” and Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, “a malicious Captain Kangaroo.”

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An escalation in confused cultural references, yes, but there’s nothing new in administration stonewalling. The last time I addressed this topic, in May, Trump and his allies were blocking more than 20 separate investigations pertaining to the Mueller probe, Trump’s taxes, and other matters. That, I wrote, amounted to a “war on transparency.” Yesterday, the war framing was everywhere again: from Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show; from the homepage of the New York Times to the homepage of the Drudge Report.

The logical conclusion here is that the White House is desperate to stanch the flow of damaging evidence: the administration is “willing to risk looking like they are engaged in an active cover-up just to not let this guy tell what he knows under oath,” Chris Hayes said on MSNBC, referring to the Sondland non-hearing. “Based on that, you, dear viewer, can draw your own conclusions about what it is he does know.” But hiding wrongdoing may not be the only, or even the primary, rationale here. (As ever, we should remember that Trump already admitted to doing the thing he’s accused of.) As I wrote in May, Trump isn’t just trying to dodge scrutiny—he’s trying to flip it back on his political opponents, impugning the motives of those demanding it and firing up his base in the process. If anyone should recognize this play, it’s the press. (To give just one example: the White House ends the daily briefing, reporters rightly complain, officials call them fame-hungry performance artists.)

The impeachment inquiry is still a huge draw for the press, but already we’re seeing signs—the reaction to Trump’s troop drawdown in Syria, for example—that coverage is becoming less wall-to-wall. As Politico’s Playbook email noted yesterday, “Trump’s power to control the headlines day in and day out is a challenge for Democrats, and it’s not one they’ve quite solved yet.” Trump’s “control,” of course, is open to question. But the more the White House can make the story about the contested legitimacy of the probe, not its underlying facts, the more its apparent two-track strategy—stonewall, then counterattack—will proliferate.

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Cipollone’s reasoning is telling of the counterattack point, in particular. Part of the White House’s opposition to the impeachment probe, he says, is that, unlike in the similar investigations against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, House Democrats have not formalized proceedings via a vote of the full House. (This is not constitutionally required.) As the LA Times’s Sarah D. Wire noted in an insightful piece Monday, in both prior cases, the formal impeachment resolution granted subpoena powers to the party in the House minority. Should that precedent be followed this time, Republicans could hijack the investigation—pivoting, for example, toward the Bidens. Should it not be followed, the White House can continue to cry foul about the absence of due process.

And as I wrote in May, the stonewalling story has a strand that is less immediate than Trump’s messaging strategy, but no less important. Trump and key allies—Attorney General William Barr chief among them—are on record as advocates of untrammeled executive authority. Complying with Congressional oversight does not fit with that conception. In May, Trump told reporters that his refusal to let Don McGahn, Cipollone’s predecessor as White House counsel, testify about Mueller would set a “very important precedent” for future presidents. That had nothing directly to do with impeachment, but his argument, if anything, is more consequential now than it was back then. There is no clear constitutional roadmap to impeachment. Precedent is thus central—and, because impeachment is so rare, we don’t have much precedent to go on.

The news cycle is breathless right now, but it’s worth stepping out of it to take a longer view. Hostile acts such as the Cipollone letter could provide a future administration with a pretext to stonewall at a similar moment of national crisis. The press is immediately downstream of this durable assault on transparency; if our elected officials can’t get their hands on information of public interest, we’re less likely to, as well. We ought to communicate that fear, and not portray developments like yesterday’s as just another partisan bun fight.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.