Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics. Read more opinion LISTEN TO ARTICLE 5:02 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email

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Let’s pretend, just for a second, that House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes was really making a serious argument in his closing statement Thursday. Chairman Adam Schiff certainly was, and it was an eloquent one. But Nunes?

Truth is, I was going to let this go, but it stuck with me hours after the hearing ended on Thursday, so here goes.

To close the Republicans’ argument after five long days of public hearings, Nunes chose to utterly ignore any of the evidence presented — he challenged absolutely none of it, nor did he argue why the allegations were not serious enough to merit impeachment — and instead gave a timeline that proved, he said, that “the whistle-blower’s complaint was a pretext” for an impeachment that Democrats intended anyway.

The pivotal date for him was July 24, when Robert Mueller testified before Congress. Some opponents of the president have speculated that Donald Trump believed he was bulletproof after Mueller’s appearance, and that explains his behavior on the July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. I’m pretty skeptical of that theory; it ascribes the kind of careful plotting to Trump that is not much in evidence elsewhere. Nor is there much evidence that Trump was on better behavior earlier. And besides, by July the Mueller report was old news, and Trump had long since declared himself exonerated, whatever the report actually said. So I don’t buy it at all.

But then there’s Nunes: “July 25, just the next day, a new anti-Trump operation begins, as someone listens to the president’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and leaks the evidence to the so-called whistle-blower.”

Here’s where I need a portmanteau for “inane” and “insane.”

Nunes would have us believe not only that the whistle-blower was able to line up a dozen or so foreign-policy and national-security professionals, many of whom were hired by Trump, to testify that they found the call inappropriate (none of them were Democrats, but apparently the whistle-blower’s lawyer has represented Democrats, so that’s something), but also that this whistle-blower apparently was able to manipulate the events themselves, including scheduling the phone call, in order to produce the raw material for this smear. Perhaps he or she also had planted all the seeds of what Rudy Giuliani and the “Three Amigos” and all had been doing for months, just in case the Mueller thing didn’t work out. I suppose there’s at least one alternative: that Trump makes calls like that so often that of course the whistle-blower could show up at the office on July 25 and get to work knowing something would turn up.

That’s what we’re being asked to believe.

Maybe Nunes didn’t really mean what he implied — that it was the whistle-blower, acting as part of an anti-Trump conspiracy with House Democrats, who set the entire thing in motion. Listen to his statement; I think that’s what he was saying.

Even if we put that aside, however, there is a logical fallacy at the root of all this. For Nunes, the Democrats are determined to impeach Donald Trump and have been from the start regardless of the evidence. In fact, for Nunes, the evidence is entirely irrelevant to the Democrats, which is why he has no need to refute or even recognize the existence of any of it (indeed, there were reports that Nunes typically walked out of of the room while Schiff and the Democratic counsel questioned witnesses).

But if that were true, why Ukraine? Why not just impeach Trump over the Russia scandal? After all, if the evidence is irrelevant, there’s no reason at all for Democrats to (supposedly) invent a new scandal when they have a perfectly good old one. Sure, Republicans have decided that the Mueller report exonerated him, but Democrats (and anyone else who read the report or watched Mueller’s testimony) don’t think that. It simply can’t be the case that Democrats are intent on impeaching Trump no matter what the evidence says and that they needed to invent the Ukraine story because the Russia one wouldn’t do.

What, then, is Nunes really saying? What Trump says: This is a witch hunt, meaning in Trump’s odd vocabulary a hunt by witches, and investigations by witches are inherently illegitimate. So if Schiff is a witch, and Nancy Pelosi is a witch, and the witnesses are witches, and the whistle-blower was most definitely a witch, then they have no basis for action against the president, and it doesn’t really matter what so-called evidence they might present. Is that a stretch? Maybe, but it’s a lot less inane/insane than what Nunes is asking us to believe.

1. Dave Hopkins on Will Hurd and where impeachment goes now.

2. Matthew Green at Mischiefs of Faction on House Republicans and how their procedural complaints and other antics are in fact typical of House minorities. I think that’s correct; what’s different about this crowd is they just aren’t very good at it or else just aren’t trying hard to come up with complaints that make sense.

3. Robert Griffin on why head-to-head general election polls may be a bad way to test electability. I agree — but there’s more. It’s not just that better-known candidates tend to do better in these surveys than others; it’s also that whatever the candidates’ images are now may not be what they’re known for by next November.

4. Julie Bosman on a nation without local news.

5. And a good E.J. Dionne wrap on the Democrats’ presidential debate.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.