No wonder Nancy Pelosi waited

| 9:09 am EST January 16, 2020
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If Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell had gotten their way, the Senate impeachment trial would already be over by now, and Trump would already be acquitted. But Nancy Pelosi made a point of not letting them have their way, and now it’s become abundantly clear why she held onto the articles of impeachment as long as she did.

If Pelosi was going to have any chance of pressuring Republican Senators into agreeing to call witnesses against Trump, she was going to need well-timed momentum and overwhelming public sentiment. Sure enough, she managed to line things up perfectly. We’ve seen media reports all month that Lev Parnas was fighting in court to get his phone back from prosecutors, so he could turn it over to the House. Sure enough, Pelosi decided to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate just as Parnas was winning that battle.

It created a situation where the House was publicly releasing Lev Parnas’ evidence against Donald Trump the day before it was sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate. We have no way of knowing if Parnas was planning to go on Rachel Maddow and blow the lid even further off the whole thing. But the point is that Pelosi knew things were coming down the pike, whether they be from Parnas or John Bolton, and she just needed to buy some time so that these things could surface right around the time Republican Senators were trying to figure out whether to cover their own butts by calling witnesses against Trump.

This doesn’t mean we’re suddenly going to have a perfectly fair Senate impeachment trial. Nothing magically works that way. But Nancy Pelosi has managed to force Republican Senators into having a trial that’s much closer to being fair. That’s impressive, considering she theoretically had no leverage over the Senate at all, until she figured out how to carve out that leverage by waiting the precisely correct amount of time.