Who would benefit from these announcements? Mr. Trump, who believes his re-election prospects are threatened most by Mr. Biden, and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been working for years to make Ukraine the fall guy for his own interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Putin has not fooled serious people, like those in the American intelligence community who determined that his government alone was responsible for meddling on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But he has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin’s propaganda in the mainstream press.

House Republicans continued to do their best to obfuscate and misdirect, as they have done throughout the impeachment process. From the start of Monday’s hearing, they yelled and objected — an understandable strategy for people whose most honest defense of the president’s actions has been: “Yeah, he did it. So what?” But this was not a performance for the history books; it was for the president himself, who registers only who is defending him and with how much fist-pounding rage.

The upshot is that Republicans, who once claimed to be the party of patriots and national security devotees, are on the record as having no problem with an American president using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to induce foreign leaders to interfere in an election on his behalf. (Unless that president were a Democrat, of course.)

The emptiness of the Republicans’ case was exemplified in an interruption by Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who stopped the morning’s proceedings after Barry Berke, the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic counsel, testified that President Trump had committed impeachable acts. “The witness has used language which impugns the motives of the president and suggests he’s disloyal to his country, and those words should be stricken from the record and taken down,” Mr. Johnson said. He was referring to a House rule that applies only to members of Congress, not witnesses. But consider the message he was sending: In the face of the most damning facts brought forward about a president in more than a generation, Mr. Johnson’s instinct was to say, in effect, How dare you speak the truth about our dear leader?

Speaking the truth, or accepting it when they hear it, is a skill that has become increasingly foreign to Republicans. Which brings us to the other big news of the day: the release of the 434-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, into the basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. The evidence for these ties — like the evidence that Mr. Trump sought a bribe from the Ukrainian president — is indisputable. So Republicans have instead attacked the investigation itself, claiming that it was the fruit of illegal actions by Trump-hating F.B.I. agents.