Opinion

During the Watergate scandal, it was believed Senate Republicans would never vote to remove Richard Nixon. That was the case all the way up to the moment investigators discovered a cache of secret White House audio tapes showing Nixon knew about the burglary of the Democratic National Committee as well as participated in its cover-up. Soon afterward, Nixon resigned knowing his fellow Republicans would abandon him.

In his first media appearance, Lev Parnas — an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani who was a key player in President Donald Trump’s impeachment — gave an explosive interview this week, aired Wednesday night, to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Last night saw the final debate between candidates running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Naturally, this morning’s papers are full of claims about winners and losers. As I have said often here at the Editorial Board, “winners and losers” with respect to debates is a political fiction. What’s real is the human desire for a victor rising to the top. We need one so much our press corps invents one for us.

They could co-star in “Dumb and Dumber—The OK Boomer Special Edition,” but Donald Trump and Boris Johnson reached a critical point in their sometimes rocky bromance this week.

Federal prosecutors recently announced that telecommunications giant Ericsson will pay more than $1 billion to resolve allegations that it conspired to make illegal payments to win contracts in five countries. The settlement included a $520 million criminal penalty imposed by the Justice Department and a $540 million civil payment to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Donald Trump is the most explicitly transactional of modern presidents, and it’s gotten him into trouble. His offering of support from the U.S. government to Ukraine in exchange for a personal favor — an announcement of investigations into his political rivals — wound up making him the third American president to be impeached.

There’s an old joke about how Richard Nixon was the kind of politician who’d cut down an endangered giant redwood, then climb on the stump and make a speech about conservation.

I argued yesterday Nancy Pelosi has more leverage over the form and integrity of the Senate impeachment trial than most people think. I argued Mitch McConnell has less. One of these people must bear the onerous weight of a lying, thieving, philandering sadist making of fetish of exoneration, and that person is not the speaker of the House.

Much of this collective wisdom derives from archly worded "news" posts explaining why "Trump" and "Adderall" are trending on social media, or tweets within the self-reinforcing edifice of #Resistance Twitter that presume, as a widely accepted fact, that the president is a patient of Dr. Feelgood who is being kept marginally alive and functional with massive infusions of pharmaceuticals. Those in turn derive from gossipy years-old reports that people who worked on "The Apprentice" with Trump either saw him snorting Adderall — an amphetamine in tablet form that can easily be crushed, although that's not the approved delivery method — or pretending to. All of this is taken to explain something, I guess. But what?

The new year for White House anti-immigration efforts has run into an early obstacle—a federal appeals court has temporarily blocked the newly announced Trump administration policy easing the way to deny legal status to immigrants who use any publicly funded benefit, like health or food stamps.

The conventional wisdom is Nancy Pelosi has no leverage in her bid to force Mitch McConnell to hold a fair impeachment trial in the Senate. The thinking is the House speaker can delay sending articles of impeachment, but the Republicans there aren’t in any hurry. She can waste more time. The Senate majority leader is still going to “win.”