There was an intriguing recurring theme in Bill Taylor’s testimony for the impeachment inquiry earlier this week. The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine laid out in his 15-page opening statement how President Donald Trump and his allies manipulated U.S. foreign policy to undermine his domestic political opponents. Time and time again, Taylor describes how Trump’s allies weren’t satisfied that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy privately agreed to pursue investigations that would legitimize Trump’s attacks on Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Zelenskiy had to announce it publicly.

Taylor described a series of conversations in which Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, laid out Trump’s intentions to him. Zelenskiy had previously signaled that Ukrainian officials would look into Burisma, the company where Biden’s son once held a board seat, as well as a conspiracy theory involving a mythical DNC server. Sondland, Taylor testified, “said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”

According to Taylor, Sondland told him that he’d spoken with Zelenskiy about the need to “clear things up” to avoid a “stalemate,” which Taylor took to mean Trump’s freeze on military aid, and that Zelenskiy had agreed to do a CNN interview. After the freeze was lifted in mid-September, Taylor said he feared that Zelenskiy “would make a statement regarding ‘investigations’ that would have played into domestic U.S. politics.” That, of course, was Trump’s likely goal: to have a foreign head of state, apparently acting of his own volition, validate his smears against domestic political rivals on American television.

Trumpworld appears to be using the same playbook against Republican senators by pushing them into a public box.

Trumpworld appears to be using the same playbook against Republican senators by pushing them into a public box. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a resolution on Thursday that criticized the House’s impeachment inquiry on procedural grounds. More than three dozen GOP senators are listed as co-sponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Graham, in his role as the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, also released a memo that described the House proceedings as “unprecedented and undemocratic.”

Many of the concerns outlined by Graham are superficial. Holding the hearings behind closed doors in a SCIF—a secure room designed for discussing classified information—makes sense when questioning diplomats about national-security matters. (It also makes it harder for witnesses to coordinate their testimony.) House Republicans aren’t being denied access to the sessions. So long as they sit on the relevant committees, they can and have participated in the inquiry. Nor is any of this novel. Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst, noted on Thursday that Democrats were operating under rules established by former Speaker John Boehner in 2015. Under those same rules, House Republicans held multiple closed-door hearings to depose witnesses during the congressional Benghazi investigations.