WASHINGTON, D.C.—Who’s winning? Now that a dozen witnesses have testified before hearings on the possible impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump, and with no more currently scheduled to appear, you might be tempted to ask. Is it time to render a judgment?Trump seems ready to declare victory. “It’s all over,” he said Wednesday, saying he’d been entirely vindicated. “I think we have to end it now.” Former Ronald Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week she also thought it was over, but with a different conclusion, “As to impeachment itself, the case has been so clearly made you wonder what exactly the Senate will be left doing. How will they hold a lengthy trial with a case this clear?”But if you’re waiting on an official verdict, get comfortable.“If you really wanted to guess, I’m thinking this lasts at least until March,” Paul Rosenweig, a senior fellow at the conservative R Street think tank, told a crowded and lively town hall audience at a high school in Alexandria, Va. on Thursday.This ain’t close to over, officially. But the primary case has been made, and what’s alleged to have happened has been articulated. It’s possible to review what’s happened so far and see where the case against the president stands. The evidenceOn the validity of the primary initial allegation that the president demanded investigations that would benefit him politically, there is no doubt.In a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump asked for “a favour”: that Ukraine investigate a conspiracy theory that it was Ukrainians who interfered in the 2016 election, not the Russians, and further to launch an investigation into then-2020 Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and his son Hunter. A reconstructed transcript of the call released by the White House which Trump has insistently urged peopl ...
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