With each day’s revelations, their defenses grow more strained and absurd. For the rest of us, it would be good to take stock of what we know at this point — not what we suspect but the things that are beyond dispute, or nearly so.

Trump was obsessed with the idea that Ukraine could produce information damaging Joe Biden. Whether Trump actually believed the debunked theory that Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor widely seen as corrupt to help his son Hunter is barely relevant. Here’s what’s not in question: Trump was focused on Biden and Ukraine. He brought it up in his call with Volodymyr Zelensky (“so if you can look into it … ”) and has repeatedly raised the question in his public comments.

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Some Republicans have offered up the astonishing defense that Trump was concerned about this matter only because of his passionate opposition to corruption. But there is no question that Trump focused much of his attention to Ukraine on the Bidens.

At Trump’s direction, Rudy Giuliani ran his own foreign policy whose goal was to get Ukraine to produce dirt on Biden. Giuliani has not been coy about this at all. Back in May, we learned that he was holding meetings with Ukrainians to try to produce this. In some cases, Giuliani would call Trump during the meeting to keep him updated. Multiple reports show Trump telling people, including both U.S. officials and the president of Ukraine, to coordinate their activities with Giuliani.

Giuliani apparently engineered the firing of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was a highly respected career diplomat whose efforts to help Ukraine fight corruption were displeasing to Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were pursuing their own efforts to loot Ukraine. For some time, they told people that Yovanovitch would soon be gone.

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In May, Trump abruptly relieved her of her duties. “I did play a role in that,” Giuliani said. Parnas and Fruman have since been arrested.

To support Giuliani’s efforts, a parallel policy track was established. “There appeared to be two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular,” said Taylor in his testimony. The White House removed responsibility for Ukraine from officials who had been coordinating policy and turned it over to Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry. At Trump’s direct instruction, all three were in communication with Giuliani.

This parallel Ukrainian initiative caused dismay and anger among many foreign policy professionals. Fiona Hill, who served as Trump’s top Russia adviser, testified that she and John Bolton, then the national security adviser, were so infuriated about Sondland’s pressure on the Ukrainians that Bolton told her he refused to get involved in whatever “drug deal” was being cooked up. Bolton instructed Hill to inform government attorneys of it.

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Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine that had been appropriated by Congress, a move many people in the government found incomprehensible. This is not in dispute, though the White House’s story about why the aid was held up has changed numerous times.

In a text to Sondland, Taylor incredulously asked whether military aid and a White House meeting Zelensky sought “are conditioned on investigations.” Taylor has now testified that the meeting was “conditioned" on investigations into Burisma — the company Hunter Biden worked for — and “alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.” Taylor added: "It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani.”

Trump believes there is nothing wrong with using foreign policy as an instrument to advance his reelection campaign. Perhaps no event in the impeachment controversy has been as important as the White House’s decision to release a partial transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, a decision that could have been made only at Trump’s direction. Trump has many times described the call as “perfect,” despite the fact that it shows Trump, in his own words, linking the release of assistance to Zelensky pursuing the investigations he wanted.

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That’s just some of what we know for sure. None of those facts are in dispute.

Indeed, most Republicans have stopped bothering to defend Trump on the facts and are instead making lame complaints about the impeachment process. They claim to be outraged that testimony is not being taken in public, despite the fact that the Republicans on three committees conducting this stage of the inquiry are present in all hearings and have had ample opportunity to question the witnesses.

Once public hearings start, Republicans will immediately switch to grousing that it’s inappropriate to put on a show for the cameras. But the defining feature of this scandal is that while we keep learning new things, the basic facts are already overwhelmingly clear. The question is what Congress will do about them.

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