Fascinating.

With a presidential election less than a year away and the near likelihood that President Trump would be acquitted by a hyperpartisan Senate even if, to modify his own analogy, he committed an act of treason in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York, the only real purpose of this whole impeachment business is to prevent a historical precedent for presidents  being allowed to get away with the kind of outrageous behavior (ignored by head-in-the-sand admirers of the Orange God-Emperor) that has characterized his first and, I trust, only term.

But presidential impeachments are rare enough to be interesting even if only as curiosities. Of course, both times we actually got that far into the process the president was acquitted; the only time a president was actually forced out, he jumped before he was pushed. Richard Nixon was both smarter and- yes, I know how people will howl about this observation- more ethical than Donald Trump. He knew the score, at least when he wasn't obsessing about his "enemies;" Trump generally has little idea that a game is going on. And again, there is about as much chance of the Senate impeaching the Dear Leader as of his being elected pope.

President of some highly politicized Fundamentalist American Protestant denomination, perhaps. But not pope.

Nevertheless, it's interesting that according to a report in the New York Times this morning, Mr. Trump was told of the whistleblower complaint about his attempt to shake down the Ukranian president last August. He already knew that the complaint had been made when he released the withheld military aid to Ukraine. Moreover, his knowledge of the complaint makes his administration's efforts to withhold information about it from the congressional committees having oversight over intelligence matters and to whom in the normal course of events it would have been submitted is suspicious, to say the least.

This proves nothing about his motivation for that decision, of course, even though at this stage the evidence that a quid pro quo for the release of the aid was strongly implied in his conversation with President Zelensky is convincing to anyone who isn't a Trump partisan. But it certainly raises questions about the decision of the administration to invoke executive privilege in what one might consider a routine matter. After all, it's hard for a congressional committee to oversee intelligence matters- matters carried out under the direction of the Executive Branch- without being told about them!

Priority does not necessarily imply causality. But the fact that Mr. Trump knew about the whistleblower's complaint while his administration was actively seeking to conceal it from those whose job required that they have access to it certainly is suspicious.

Plausibility has never mattered to Mr. Trump or his supporters. It probably won't matter to the Republican majority in the Senate. But it will matter to history. The revelation that the aid was released after the president had learned about the whistleblower's complaint, combined with the fact that his administration was actively seeking to withhold knowledge of the complaint from members of Congress with the legal right to it and who in fact required it in order to do their job, casts the president's motives for releasing the aid in a very suspicious light.

It certainly will be noted as such by history. And given the virtual certainty that the Senate will acquit Mr. Trump no matter what the evidence, the verdict of history is the whole point.

What conclusion would Mr. Spock reach? The only logical one: that at the very least, Mr. Trump- knowing as he did about the whistleblower complaint- desperately wanted to conceal it from those with the power and the responsibility to hold him accountable.

Accountability, of course, is one thing that Donald Trump absolutely despises and wants to avoid at all costs. And history will record that even if Mr. Trump is completely innocent of any wrongdoing, we have never in our history had a president with the absolute genius he has for dependably behaving in any given situation like somebody who is trying to get away with something.