Rachel Maddow just turned Donald Trump’s impeachment trial completely upside down

| 12:34 am EST January 16, 2020
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Imagine being a Republican Senator and being nervous about whether Donald Trump’s impeachment trial might blow back on you when you have to run for reelection. Imagine trying to figure out whether you’re better off voting to call witnesses against Trump, in order to insulate yourself from that blowback. You’re already in a mess of your own making, for getting into bed with Trump to begin with. And then last night happened.

At the end of her show last night, Rachel Maddow acknowledged that she spent months trying to line up an interview with Ukraine scandal figure Lev Parnas. He was only arrested three months ago, which means that Maddow has been working on this essentially from the start. We don’t know when Lev and his attorneys finally agreed to do the interview; that could have happened five minutes before the interview. But we do know that Maddow’s coup just turned everything upside down.

Lev Parnas just positioned himself as Exhibit A in Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. House impeachment managers will ensure that Lev’s documents and text messages will play a central role in the Senate trial, whether the Senate Republicans allow Lev to show up and testify or not. Lev also made a point of pushing John Bolton front and center as a witness, so even if the Republicans don’t want to risk having a wildcard like Lev testify, they pretty much have to call their own favorite neocon Bolton to testify at this point.

Rachel Maddow has a reputation for being a tough interviewer, and yet she still managed to land the interview that everyone else in her profession was also surely trying to get. Maddow asked Lev Parnas everything that needed to be asked, and she got a ton out of him. Republican Senators are surely lying awake right now, trying to figure out what just happened to them, and what they’re supposed to do now.