The Sondland bomb

According to Sondland, Vice President Pence was informed of the extortion attempt and said nothing. Both acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were closely involved in the effort. Trump would not hesitate to fire all three men if it would put him one point higher in the polls. But shedding your vice president, your chief of staff and your secretary of state is not a strategy of containment; it would be the complete collapse of the executive branch into recrimination and chaos.

[...]

Some stories, such as the involvement of Attorney General William P. Barr, are yet to be fully told. Why did Justice Department prosecutors dismiss the possibility of campaign finance law violations after such a narrow and cursory examination? Why did Trump, according to the rough transcript of the July 25 phone call, say (twice) that Barr would be in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or his people to cooperate in a Burisma/Bidens investigation?

[...]

Congress now has every reason and right to hear directly from Barr, Pence, Mulvaney and Pompeo, given their implication in public corruption. And their refusal to testify compounds their apparent corruption with cowardice.

  WaPo

To be fair, given the opportunity to confess, is there any corrupt politician that wouldn't be a coward? I don't think cowardice adds any perceptible negative weight to being corrupt.

Second, we have once again seen evidence of Trump’s mobster mentality.

And that's the crux of the matter: This is a mobster administration.

The president surrounds himself with a bodyguard of rotters — fixers who are willing to do his dirty work based on hints delivered with all the subtlety of a silent film actor. Any leader who would depend on Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for service and counsel is not a bad judge of character; he is a good judge of useful knaves.

Bingo.

Public servants such as Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, raised concerns about corruption up the normal lines of authority. But at the top of those lines Trump has placed people such as Mulvaney, Barr, Pence and Pompeo, who are morally neutered. In a perverse form of political Darwinism, leaders in the executive branch have been selected for traits of turpitude and tractability.

They have been selected for thosse qualities. Those qualities haven't been glossed over or overlooked. They've been selected for.

None of this is likely to change the minds of most elected Republicans on impeachment itself.

No, because they have been coerced into submission - and most likely because they have similar characteristics - at least the tractability.

In the face of serious charges against the president, Republicans have no exculpatory evidence to offer. Their true appeal — their only appeal — is tribal. Republicans would certainly support impeachment for a Democratic president who sought foreign help in rigging an American presidential election, particularly in a manner that strengthened an international rival. But no matter. Tribalism dictates that Republicans stick together in their opposition to impeachment because, well, you can’t give aid and comfort to an enemy intent on ruining the country. The only thing that matters in the end? Using power to keep power.

UPDATE:

Everybody was in the loop.

Sondland said that later in his opening statement, which is going to be one of those documents on display in the National Archives one day. The president*. The vice president. The Secretary of State. The acting White House chief of staff. Rudy Giuliani. Even Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin. Sondland wrapped every one of them in dynamite. They were all in on the shakedown, which, when you come right down to it, was not very complicated at all. All of those people wanted the Bidens investigated. All of those people (initially) tried to leverage a White House visit for the new Ukrainian president to get that. Later, they continued to shake that president down by withholding military aid that already had been approved by the Congress. All of them, wrapped in dynamite by Gordon Sondland: hotelier, bon vivant, and now a human detonator.

  Charles P Pierce