WASHINGTON, D.C.—Every day in Lafayette Square across the street from the White House, assorted protesters, demonstrators, evangelists and attention-seekers plant themselves among the tourists, proclaiming causes and leafletting. One sunny afternoon just over a week ago, one man’s voice suddenly cut through the noise with a shout: “F--- YOU DONALD TRUMP.” In his mid-40s, dressed in clean business casual, the man extended both middle fingers at the entrance to the U.S. president’s official home.

A moment later, the man looked to the family with young children next to him. “I apologize,” he said softly. “But the door is open, and he might hear me.”

Just then, a tall man nearby with shaggy white hair and a long beard cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “We have a constitution for a reason.”

Across the street, what appeared to be a tour group exited through the front door of the White House and walked across the grounds, unmoved. The open door closed. It seemed unlikely the expressions of frustrated protest had reached their intended audience, or achieved much beyond making the shouters feel that at least they’d tried.

In that, as much as in their rage, they shared much in common with the official democratic congressional attempts to hold the president accountable.

What a difference a week makes.

Just seven days ago, on Sept. 17, I reported on the first congressional hearing in an impeachment investigation into Donald Trump. That investigation was then focused closely on stirring the ashes of the Mueller report on Russian interference into the 2016 election, and the democratic leadership had gone out of its way to stress that it was not yet an official impeachment inquiry, but rather an exploratory step toward one. At the time, it seemed the odds were long that this process would ever lead to a vote to impeach Trump — the likelihood the president would be removed even more remote.

After an astounding week in U.S. politics, the ground has shifted remarkably.

Thursday morning, at the other end of the National Mall from where those protesters and tourists gather, the House intelligence committee had convened a new, now formal and leadership-approved impeachment inquiry, and was hearing from acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire.

“I believe that everything in this matter here is totally unprecedented,” Maguire told the committee. He was speaking about his response to an intelligence community whistleblower complaint that was publicly released minutes before, alleging that the president pressured the president of the Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political rival in advance of the 2020 presidential election, and outlined a coverup in the White House to “lock down” that conversation from wider view by moving the detailed notes on the call to a more classified server.

The notes on the call that was the subject of that complaint had been released a day earlier at the instruction of the president himself, though they were far from exculpatory. The call record shows Trump responding to a request from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for military aid by saying, “I would like you to do us a favour, though,” and instructing him to investigate former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden and his son, and to work with U.S. Attorney-General Bill Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on that investigation.

The substance of that call and the central allegation of the complaint — pressure applied to the Ukrainian to investigate Biden — has been openly admitted by both Trump and Giuliani. And that, all by itself, strikes many as impeachable conduct, soliciting the interference of a foreign government in the election.

The further allegation that Trump ordered a halt to much-needed U.S. military aid to Ukraine and cancelled a visit by Vice-President Mike Pence to Zelenskiy’s swearing in as leverage, backed up by media reports that it “was clear” to Ukrainian officials in advance of the call that meeting or speaking with Trump was contingent on agreeing to the Biden investigation, create a further case that Trump may have used his power over U.S. foreign policy to help himself politically.

Trump and his Republican supporters have seized on this further circumstantial case as the basis for their defence: that there is no proof in the call transcript of a “quid pro quo” in which Trump explicitly makes U.S. aid (which was eventually released to the Ukraine) conditional on providing partisan political help.

Despite the president’s insistence, the lack of quid pro quo smoking gun seems unlikely to prevent the rapid momentum toward impeachment that has happened politically this week as this matter has come to light. Powerful House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had long previously opposed attempting to impeach the president because she believed public opinion was against it, has now put the process firmly in motion. As of Thursday afternoon, a count by NBC News showed 221 members of the house favouring some form of impeachment action against Trump, a majority of the House. It seems highly likely now that the House will bring articles of impeachment forward and vote to impeach the president and send the matter to the Senate for a trial.

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Donald Trump remains defiant. He said it was a “perfect call” and, in a press conference at the UN on Wednesday, denied he had done anything wrong. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times released an audio recording of Trump comparing whoever served as the whistleblower’s source of information to a spy committing treason, and reminisced that in the “old days” “we used to handle it differently than we do now” (an apparent reference to a time when treason was punishable by summary execution).

Republicans in Congress are, for now, mostly standing by the president. Rep. Devin Nunes sits on the House intelligence committee and said during questioning of Maguire that the hearing Thursday was a case of Democrats and their “media assets” working against the president by “ginning up a fake story.”

Influential Senate Republican Lindsey Graham tweeted Thursday, “As to the whistleblower complaint — the transcript speaks for itself — no quid pro quo. The Democrats bought a pig in a poke,” and followed up, “As to the other matters in complaint: Clearly a co-ordinated effort to take second-hand information to create a narrative damaging to the president. When I think of whistleblower complaints I generally think of someone with first-hand knowledge of the events in question.”

The Republican party has not been in perfect solidarity with the president on this matter, however. Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse expressed deep concerns about Tump’s apparent conduct in the call, and called for further investigation. Thursday, Vermont’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, supported an impeachment inquiry into the whistleblower complaint. “I think the inquiry is important, yes, and where it leads from here is going to be driven by the facts that are established,” an Associated Press report quoted him saying.

Where this leads is difficult to predict as new information related to this whistleblower complaint continues to break seemingly by the hour, shifting the political situation each time. As recently as Monday, the prospect of impeachment seemed remote. Thursday there was speculation on cable news that the house may vote to impeach the president as soon as next month.

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