On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein. It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story of how the Committee to Re-elect the President burglarized Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. That reporting and the impeachment hearings that followed eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace in 1974. Bharara wanted to hear about what differences Bernstein sees between the Nixon impeachment proceedings and Donald Trump’s today.
That was the week when the New York Times reported that viewership of those “boring” hearings was proving to be “as big as Monday Night Football.” That was the week when the world heard from, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman on Donald Trump’s July 25th “perfect” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky; from ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on how “everyone was in the loop” when it came to the Ukrainian quid pro quo (not to speak of his “Zelensky loves your ass” exchange with the president); and from the steely former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, on how that country promulgated the fiction that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 American election.