The Washington Post's Philip Bump has tracked down statements from ten different Republican senators who in the past indicated that impeachment charges against President Donald Trump would be far more serious if it could be proven there was a quid-pro-quo agreement that involved exchanging the release of foreign aid to Ukraine for the investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden.

All of the statements flagged by Bump came before this week's bombshell revelation that former national security adviser John Bolton's upcoming book will reportedly say the president directly linked Ukraine aid to the Biden investigation.

Writing for The Atlantic, University of Missouri Law professor Frank Bowman excoriated the White House legal team for their rationale against honoring congressional subpoenas in the impeachment inquiry.

"On Saturday, Trump’s lawyer Pat Philbin tried to extinguish any flickers of enlightened self-interest among Republicans by arguing that Trump was entitled to stonewall the House because the House hadn’t properly authorized its own subpoenas," wrote Bowman. "Like so many contentions of the president’s defenders, this is malarkey thinly draped with plausible-sounding distortions of facts, rules, court opinions, and the Constitution itself."