Indeed, at her news conference with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was hard-pressed to get any reporters interested in legislation to rein in prescription-drug prices or reset trade policy with Mexico and Canada. The only topics of interest were impeachment and the disparate strands of inquiry growing out of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president in which he asked for help in investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Read: How impeachment is testing Trump’s focus

If Clinton’s White House famously strived to compartmentalize its handling of the news of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and the resulting impeachment probe—handing off scandal-related work largely to lawyers and political strategists while the rest of the administration focused on routine business—Trump keeps pouring fuel on the impeachment flame with his every utterance, most recently with his public urging that China (and Ukraine) should investigate the Bidens. And Trump has repeatedly insisted he won’t do any business with Democrats in Congress as long as impeachment is on the table. That alone all but guarantees relentless attention to a single story line.

“I don’t know that this is interrupting them,” says Michael Feldman, who was a senior aide to Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton impeachment and is now a political and communications consultant in New York and Washington. “This is what they do. You look to your leader for cues about how you should be spending your time. Our leader was saying, ‘We’re going to get back to the business of the American people.’”

Feldman has vivid memories of the febrile atmosphere in Washington in the days after the Lewinsky scandal first broke, in January 1998. “The White House had kind of shut down,” he recalls. “Nobody knew what was going to happen next.” At a birthday party for Andrew Friendly, a fellow White House staffer who had been Clinton’s personal aide, Feldman sat at a table with Bruce Lindsey, counselor to the president; Nancy Hernreich, the director of Oval Office operations; and Betty Currie, the president’s personal secretary, who would become a player in the running drama because she had helped arrange Lewinsky’s furtive visits to the Oval Office. At the same table sat Friendly’s uncle, R. W. Apple Jr., then the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. “And we talked about the weather,” Feldman says dryly.

Carl Leubsdorf, then the Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News, has equally intense memories of those first days. “We were all constantly being asked to go off on wild-goose chases,” he told me. “I remember being at a dinner party the Saturday after the Lewinsky story broke and getting a call seeking to match a story by Wolf Blitzer that Clinton was considering resigning. Knowing I had no way to match that, I told the desk that it seemed highly unlikely and that they should be very cautious. It was like that every night for the first couple of weeks.”