This analysis was excerpted from the January 23 edition of CNN's Meanwhile in America, the daily email about US politics for global readers. Sign up here to receive it every weekday morning.

(CNN) Senate Republicans need to end this impeachment trial before President Donald Trump confesses to anything else.

His timing was problematic, to say the least. Democrats had just spent a marathon Senate session trying to get Republicans to agree to force Trump to hand over potentially incriminating "material," including new witnesses and evidence.

The President's lawyers say he's got every right to withhold evidence pertinent to the case, because executive privilege covers sensitive presidential decisions. And who knows what "material" Trump really meant? But his tendency to blow the whistle on himself is one reason why the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, wants Trump acquitted as soon as possible.

The President's bursts of honesty have torpedoed his own interests before. After he fired FBI Chief James Comey, he told NBC that he did it because of the Russia investigation, opening himself to accusations of obstructing justice. Accused of asking Ukraine to probe Joe Biden, he went onto the White House lawn and asked China to do the same thing.

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