Trial: the determination of an accused person’s guilt or innocence after hearing evidence for the prosecution and for the accused and the judicial examination of the issues involved.

A proceeding in which opposing parties in a dispute present evidence and make arguments on the application of the law before a judge or jury. 

Here’s what we know. We know President Trump is a liar. Think we can all agree. Just a fact. A known fact. We know Vice President Pence has lied to us. Secretary of State Pompeo has lied to us, as has Attorney General Barr.

This we know. It’s on videotape.

To the best of my knowledge – and yours – Lev Parnas has never lied to us.

The New Evidence Against Trump Since He Was Impeached

From Parnas to Nunes, a quick summary of the details that have come to light over the last month.

by Kim Wehle for The Bulwark  January 21, 2020 5:30 AM

As the Trump impeachment trial gets underway, Democrats are banging their heads and Republicans are wringing their hands over the reality that not all the facts are in. A longer investigation in the House of Representatives—and Trump’s lawful compliance—could have produced a fuller evidentiary record, especially if more witnesses had been compelled to testify. As of now, there are important questions that still remain unanswered.

Yet even in the month since the House impeachment proceedings ended, many new details have emerged in unexpected and unconventional ways. All are damaging to President Trump. Some are real doozies.

Many of the new facts came out over the holidays and early in the new year, when the nation’s attentions were elsewhere, so it is worth taking a moment to summarize what we have learned since the House approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump on December 20.

The new information falls roughly into five categories:

1. Trump’s knowledge of the quid pro quo;
2. the illegality of the scheme;
3. Trump’s outsourcing of the State Department to Rudy Giuliani;
4. the involvement in or awareness of the Ukraine scandal by other top administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General Bill Barr, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and
5. Russia’s ongoing interference in American elections.

Let’s discuss each of these in turn.

Trump’s Knowledge of the Pressure Campaign
The first category of new information bears on Trump’s knowledge of the Rudy Giuliani-led shakedown of Ukrainian President Zelensky, in which the withholding of a White House meeting and $391 million in Senate-approved aid was dangled in exchange for a derogatory announcement of an investigation into Trump’s rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. Congressional Republicans have carped about the purportedly thin record of Trump’s personal involvement in the scam, but that narrative is becoming harder and harder to articulate with a straight face. The new details include the following (but note that this list is hardly exhaustive):

• Two days after the articles of impeachment passed, 300 pages of new emails were made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the Center for Public Integrity. The material shows that 91 minutes after Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky, White House officials directed Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist to halt the monetary aid to Ukraine. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official who sent the email request, Michael Duffey, is among the four witnesses whom Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has asked to hear from in the impeachment trial. So far, Senate Republicans have signaled “no” to Duffey’s testimony. In a January 2, 2020 report, Just Security disclosed that it had reviewed unredacted copies of the emails, which span from June to early October 2019. In one of those emails, dated August 20, 2019, Duffey told the acting Pentagon comptroller, Elaine McCusker: “Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”
• John Bolton—a guy who, according to former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, called the Ukrainian scheme a “drug deal” that he refused be involved in—has made clear that he is willing to testify. Indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Bolton knows a lot about what happened in Trumpland.
• During their January 15 interview, Parnas told Maddow that “President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” that Parnas would never act “without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president,” and that Trump’s claims that he doesn’t know Parnas are lies. Although Parnas did not state that he had direct a conversation with Trump about the quid pro quo, he met with the president several times. Parnas instead worked through Giuliani, who told Parnas all along that he was updating Trump. Parnas told the New York Times that “I am betting my whole life that Trump knew exactly everything that was going on that Rudy Giuliani was doing in Ukraine.”
• Text messages and call logs handed over by Parnas’s lawyer to the House Intelligence Committee reveal that Parnas also communicated with Tommy Hicks, Jr., a Trump donor and family friend, and Joseph Ahearn, a pro-Trump fundraiser, about the Ukraine pressure campaign to spread unsubstantiated, damaging information about Biden and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Congress should hear from these Trump associates directly.

The Scheme’s Lawlessness
The second category of new information includes a report from a government oversight agency finding that the withholding of aid was against federal law, along with emails and text messages showing that officials within the Trump administration flagged the legal problems in real time. There is also additional information corroborating that Trump’s request for a “favor” of Zelensky in the infamous July 25 phone call had nothing to do with corruption in Ukraine and everything to do with smearing a U.S. citizen and political opponent.

• Parnas told Maddow that the quid pro quo involved more than just military aid. “It was all aid,” he said. Last week, the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report concluding that Trump’s halting of funding for Ukraine broke federal law for no good reason: “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.”
• Parnas also told Maddow that the scheme “was never about corruption” as Trump and his allies claim. “It was strictly about Burisma, which included Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.” Recall that Federal Election Commission chair Ellen Weintraub suggested in a tweet the day after release of the July 25 call summary that what Trump did was likely illegal, as “the Commission has recognized the ‘broad scope’ of the foreign national contribution prohibition and found that even where the value of a good or service ‘may be nominal or difficult to ascertain,’ such contributions are nevertheless banned.”
• Documents released through the FOIA action also show substantial efforts by Mulvaney and other alarmed officials within the Trump administration to gin up a justification for withholding the Ukraine aid after the whistleblower complaint became public. There was concern that Trump’s directive would violate the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the executive branch to notify Congress if appropriated money was held or shifted elsewhere. That never happened, as the GAO report confirms.
• In response to an email from Mulvaney inquiring “about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back,” Mulvaney aide Robert B. Blair (another of the four witnesses that Schumer has requested to hear from at trial), wrote: “Expect Congress to become unhinged.” This is the same Congress that has Republicans virtually united behind Trump—despite his disregard for their own body’s constitutional prerogative to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent.
• In response to a separate FOIA request lodged by the New York Times, OMB issued a blanket refusal to turn over 40 pages of emails regarding the decision to freeze the aid. This information should be in the hands of Congress and the American public before trial starts this week. A lawsuit is now pending.

Trump’s Outsourcing of the State Department to Giuliani
The third category of information to recently come to light involves Trump’s bypassing of federal employees as he thumbed his nose at longstanding official U.S. policy towards Ukraine to instead have his private lawyer conduct foreign policy on his personal behalf.

• The documents released by Parnas’s lawyer show that, at Giuliani’s behest, Parnas was pushing not just for Zelensky’s announcement of negative information about Biden but also for the ouster of Yovanovitch. The information includes Parnas’s handwritten notes on hotel stationery, as well as communications with top aides to Zelensky and former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko.
• In the trove of documents that Parnas released is a letter from Giuliani to Zelensky, in which he states that “I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump. Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.” Giuliani then goes on to congratulate Zelensky “on a truly impressive victory in the recent election” and requests a meeting right away—the letter was dated May 10, 2019, and Giuliani asked for a meeting on May 13 or 14—with the president’s “knowledge and consent.”
• The text messages make clear that Giuliani was deeply involved in Trump’s firing of a Yovanovitch, a career U.S. diplomat. A new figure in the scandal, Republican congressional candidate from Connecticut Robert Hyde, repeatedly used expletive-filled language in discussing Yovanovitch, writing in one message to Parnas: “F— that b—-.” The texts suggest that Hyde had Yovanovitch under surveillance, although Parnas told Maddow he didn’t believe she was in danger. The day before Yovanovitch was informed that she was out of the State Department, Giuliani texted Parnas: “he fired her again.”
• Parnas’s text messages also reference Giuliani’s efforts to obtain a U.S. visa for Viktor Shokin, a former Ukrainian official who accused Biden of corruption and had been denied a visa under Yovanovitch’s watch. Giuliani wrote: “It’s going to work I have no 1 in it.” Parnas told Maddow that “no 1” referred to Trump.
• Ukraine has since announced an investigation into the possible surveillance of Yovanovitch. Secretary Pompeo weakly told one radio show host that “we will do everything we need to do to evaluate whether there was something that took place there,” and told another radio host that he’d “never heard about this at all. . . . Until this story broke, I had, to the best of my recollection, had never heard of this at all.”

The Involvement of Other Top Officials in the Ukraine Shakedown
Fourth, there is mounting evidence confirming suspicions that arose as far back as September: Trump’s top brass was either involved in or had knowledge of what he was doing. If Trump’s conduct is impeachable, these individuals on the federal payroll should be held accountable to the American people, too.

• Parnas told Maddow that the scheme involved numerous high-ranking Trump officials, including Pence and Barr, as well as Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee. Parnas said that “Barr had to have known everything. . . . Attorney General Barr was basically on the team.” As for the others, including Pence: “Everybody was in the loop.” This view corroborates the testimony of U.S Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who said under oath in the House impeachment inquiry that “everyone was in the loop.” Recall too that the notes from Trump’s July 25 phone call to pressure Zelensky expressly referenced Barr, and Nunes’s conversations with Parnas are memorialized in AT&T call records.
• Parnas told Maddow that he told Serhiy Shefir, a top Zelensky aide, that Pence would cancel his planned trip to Zelensky’s inauguration unless Ukraine announced an investigation into the Bidens. When it was clear to Parnas that the announcement would not happen, he called Giuliani, who, according to Parnas, said, “OK, they’ll see.” The Pence trip was canceled the next day.
• Investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, part of the Department of Justice, seized the documents from Parnas’s home on October 9, 2019, as part of its investigation and subsequent indictment of Parnas on federal campaign-finance-related charges. Under the leadership of Bill Barr, therefore, DOJ had this impeachment-related information from Parnas’s files for months—including prior to and during the entirety of the House’s formal impeachment proceedings—before it was finally shared with Congress. These files only came to light upon a request made by Parnas’s attorney, Joseph Bondy, to the federal judge overseeing Parnas’s criminal case.

The Danger Russia Still Poses for the 2020 Presidential Election
Oddly, the heart of the Trump impeachment has been lost in the partisanship of it all. National security depends on the the security of our elections, and Russia is clearly still at it.

• On January 13, a cybersecurity company reported that in early November 2019 the Russian government hacked the email credentials of workers at the Ukrainian oil company Burisma Holdings, which is at the center of the Trump impeachment story. (Hunter Biden served on Burisma’s board.) In his July 25 call, Trump urged Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and Burisma, but FBI Director Christopher Wray has said publicly that there is no evidence that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election. In her testimony before the House, Fiona Hill called the accusations against Ukraine a “fictional narrative,” and made a plea to Congress that “In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interest.”

By pushing the unsubstantiated Ukrainian corruption narrative in support of Trump’s corrupt actions, Republicans’ defense of Trump plays directly into the hands of Russian president Vladimir Putin. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller emphasized in his own testimony before the House Intelligence Committee: “It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here and they expect to do it during the next campaign.” He urged that “much more needs to be done to protect against this intrusion, not just by the Russians but by others as well,” warning Congress that “whatever legislation will encourage us . . . working together—the FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest—should be pursued. Aggressively. Early.”

People who care about the facts can only hope that all of this new evidence will be introduced at trial so that Americans get the full story they deserve. (Under Senate rules, Chief Justice John Roberts has the authority to rule on the admissibility of evidence, but could be overruled by a majority of the Senate.) Even so, the bigger hope is that Senate Republicans heed their oaths to uphold the Constitution when they each consider whether it’s worth putting a stop to Trump’s serial use of foreign governments to entrench his own power.

Alas, such hope is looking more like a fantasy. As former Rep. Carlos Curbelo—who lost his Florida district to a Democrat in 2018—explained to the Wall Street Journal in characterizing the pressures that congressional Republicans are facing: “If a member broke with the president on this issue, they’d be shouted at in public, approached in restaurants, the gym, and people would be very angry.”

President Trump Isn’t the Only One on Trial

The House is on trial, too. And so is the Senate.

By Adam J. White for The Bulwark.  JANUARY 19, 2020 5:39 AM

When the Senate opened its impeachment trial by swearing an oath to “do impartial justice,” the candid citizen might ask whether such a thing is even possible. The candid senator might, too. How can partisan senators do “impartial justice?” First, by understanding what is on trial. And second, by understanding what the Senate was created to be.

This is a trial of President Donald Trump, but it is more than that. As their oath emphasized, the senators sit in judgment of “the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump.” These words echo the Constitution itself, which entrusts the Senate with “the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” Which means that this is a trial of the House’s impeachment—which is to say, a trial of not just the facts and legal questions surrounding Trump, but also retrospectively of the prudential judgments surrounding the House’s decision. Which requires the Senate to make prudential judgments of its own.

The breadth of discretion inherent in impeachment has been evident since the Founding. The Constitution defines impeachment broadly in terms of “treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founders knew that this standard is not susceptible to easy legal definition. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist, impeachment “can never be tied down by such strict rules, either in the delineation of the offense by” the House that prosecutes it, “or in the construction of it by” the Senators who stand in judgment of it.

Rather, he wrote, impeachable offenses “are of a nature” best described as “political”—not political in the low sense of partisanship, but in the highest senses of statesmanship and the “public trust.”

And while the president’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, contends that “abuse of power” is not grounds for impeachment, Hamilton saw otherwise: impeachment would be the ultimate protection against “abuse of the executive authority.” (“What more,” Hamilton added, “could be desired by an enlightened and reasonable people?”)

The founding generation entrusted these judgments to the Senate because they intended the Senate to embody a mix of both accountability and statesmanship—and to be deeply invested in the administration of government power.

While the executive branch would always take the lead in administration, the Framers intended for the Senate to temper the executive’s worst instincts in crucial ways: by playing a significant role in the appointment of Cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and other officers; and by playing a similar role in diplomacy, through its power in making treaties.

And these powers, deeply investing the Senate in good administration, were precisely what Hamilton expected to animate senators in impeachment: a readiness to “punish the abuse of [the Senators’] confidence or to vindicate their own authority.” While impeachment was never intended to be a tool for policing run-of-the-mill “maladministration” (as Madison warned), it was part of the Senate’s core tools for preventing extraordinary miscarriages of administration or abuses of power.

In short, the same Senate that was intended temper the House in matters of legislation—the metaphorical saucer to cool hot House coffee—would also temper the president.

And the Senate’s dual position, guarding against the House and the presidency alike, is at the heart of the “impartial justice” that senators are now asked to provide: In trying this impeachment, they are supposed to stand impartially between the House’s institutional interests, and the presidency’s.

---

Those colliding institutional interests are the crux of this impeachment battle. The House has impeached the president, in part, for his broad assertion of executive privilege against congressional oversight.

House oversight is indeed fundamental to the House’s exercise of its express constitutional powers. But executive privilege “is fundamental to the operation of Government and inextricably rooted in the separation of powers under the Constitution,” as the Supreme Court emphasized in the Nixon tapes case. Accordingly, the task for the Senate today is, as it was for the Court in 1974, to eschew both sides’ categorical assertions of power, and to make more nuanced, prudential judgments that strike the best possible balance between the House’s and the president’s powers.

Meanwhile, for senators to vindicate the Founders’ vision of a Senate that prevents executive abuses and promotes good administration, they should not preemptively reject factual information by categorically foreswearing witnesses.

If the House or the president moves for witnesses to testify, then the senators should carefully consider whether each prospective witness’s testimony would aid the senators’ judgment with respect to the charges brought by the House, or to the defenses asserted by the president.

Finally, the Senate should scrutinize the president’s use of shadow diplomacy—which is at the heart of the Ukraine affair.

The president has broad power to define his administration’s foreign policy, but his heavy reliance on Rudy Giuliani and other personal agents flouts the Constitution’s framework for the appointment of officers and ambassadors. The Constitution trusts the Senate to guard against the president’s unilateral staffing of the administration. If the president is systematically thwarting the Senate’s constitutional role, then the impeachment trial provides the Senate’s last opportunity to protect against the bitter fruits that the president’s actions produced.

The senators swore an oath to “impartial justice.” Will they live up to their oath? Hamilton hoped so. When senators try impeachments, he wrote, we must “count upon their pride, if not upon their virtue.”

Trump Is Forever

The four reasons why Republicans won’t turn on Trump, no matter what.

BY Jonathan V. Last for The Bulwark.  DECEMBER 17, 2019 5:25 AM

The level of loyalty Donald Trump commands from elected Republicans seems qualitatively different from that offered to previous Republican presidents.

For instance: Republicans told President Nixon to resign his office. Ronald Reagan ran a vigorous primary challenge to President Ford. President George H.W. Bush was seriously challenged in the 1992 primary. President George W. Bush faced Republican revolts over a Supreme Court nomination, Medicare expansion, and attempted immigration reform.

President Trump’s policy ideas often diverge dramatically from Republican orthodoxy—on trade, executive authority, entitlements, foreign policy—and his almost daily drumbeat of scandals and misadventures have been a millstone around the party’s neck. He won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin; lost the House in 2018; has been historically unpopular; and has been trailing his most likely Democratic 2020 rival by double digits for the better part of a year. He is now facing the prospect of impeachment.

If the normal laws of politics applied to Trump, this would be about the time that Republicans decided to cut and run.

But that isn’t happening.

There are four explanations as to why this is and they all add up to the fact that where previous presidents have been stewards of the party, Trump owns the GOP in a way that is unprecedented in the modern era.

In the Republican party, Trump is forever.

(1) The tipping point came early. A common fallacy of the Trump years has been that the tipping point is always close: That there is some action or event, just over the horizon, that will cause Republicans to finally abandon him once they understand the full costs.

Instead, the Republican party establishment seems rather more supportive of Trump today than it was in January 2017.

Which suggests that maybe there was a tipping point, but that it went in the other direction and it came early in his tenure.

I would posit that in late 2018, after the scope of the midterm losses became clear, two things happened. First, the casualties of the midterm were precisely the Republicans who were most likely to rebel against Trump, so while the GOP lost the midterms, Trump emerged with a stronger hold on the party.

Second, with the midterm loss, Republicans tipped over into a place where the sunk costs were so great that they were no longer willing to challenge him on any matter.

And with every passing scandal since then, the cumulative weight of these sunk costs has made independence from Trump less, not more, likely. Because while the doctrine of sunk costs is a fallacy for economic actors, it’s very real for political actors.

(2) Trump primarily uses his political capital against other Republicans. One of the strange inversions of the Trump years is that unlike every other president of the modern era, Trump has treated his own party as his principal opposition.

Normally presidents endure intraparty griping because they need the votes. They don’t want to spend political capital fighting their own party because they need to conserve it to fight with the other side in order to win passage for legislative initiatives.

Trump has turned that dynamic on its head.

From the time he declared his candidacy, Trump has focused most of his attacks on other Republicans. Yes, he takes the obligatory shots at Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. And there was his “go back” to where you came from attack on “the squad.” But Trump’s real passion seems to be fighting Republicans whom he deems insufficiently loyal.

So while Democrats have literally no reason to fear Trump—he has been so helpful to their electoral prospects that they have more to fear from working with him than opposing him—it is Republicans who have come to fear crossing their president.

This is an unusual situation.

The benefit of this arrangement for Trump is that by keeping a constant threat of retribution leveled against fellow Republicans, his party has fallen in line to a truly unprecedented degree. The cost is that, by spending so much time warring with Republicans he has weakened his party’s standing, frittered away his congressional majority, and seen nearly his entire legislative agenda stall.

In a normal presidency, this price might be seen as prohibitively high. But in a presidency that’s been in constant turmoil—veering from crisis to crisis and now climaxing with impeachment—it’s a bargain at twice the price. The grim reality is that Trump needs Republican solidarity much more than he needs legislative accomplishments.

And also, if we’re going to be candid, he has never seemed terribly interested in passing legislation in the first place.

(3) Trump is forever. In the normal course of the last century, the president has been only the interim head of his party. He appoints his people throughout both his administration and the institution of his party, but eventually he leaves office and retires to life outside the public realm. At that point, he may still exert some influence behind the scenes. He may be close to donors. His mentees might still consult his advice. But other political actors are jockeying for position; the world moves on.

It seems highly unlikely that Donald Trump will ever move on.

Either a year from now or five years from now, Donald Trump will step away from the presidency. Raise your hand if you think he will retire to Mar-a-Lago and delete his Twitter account.

It seems much more likely—maybe inevitable—that once he leaves office, Trump will continue to tweet and call in to cable news shows. Perhaps he will even attend political rallies, which is the part of the job he seems to enjoy most.

There is no reason to think—none at all—that he will discontinue his penchant for weighing in on American politics on an hourly basis. There is every reason to think that he will vigorously attack any Republican who was disloyal to him during his administration. Or retroactively criticizes his tenure. Or runs in opposition to one of his preferred candidates. Or jeopardizes any of his many and varied interests.

What this means is that there is no way for a Trump-skeptical Republican to simply wait out the Trump years. There will be no “life after Trump” because Trump is going to be the head boss of Republican politics for the rest of his days.

As I said at the beginning: Trump is not a caretaker of the Republican party. He is the owner.

Once you realize that Trump is forever, it’s easier to understand individual Republicans’ reluctance to stand against him on impeachment. If you’re a Republican with future political ambitions—even if you’re retiring from public life for the moment—you know that voting against Trump now means that he will come after you when you try to re-enter politics.

(4) There is another. The corollary to the idea that Trump is forever is the fact that he clearly has dynastic aspirations. Early on people suspected that Ivanka Trump would one day try to take over for her father. But the last three years have shown that Don Jr. is his logical heir.

Where Ivanka thought it smart to work in the White House and enmesh herself in governing, Don. Jr. understood that the real path to power was to go on Fox News and imitate his father. It’s working.

And if you think Trump will retire to the countryside to let his children make their own way in the world, then you have not paid any attention, at all, to the history of this family.

Hard-headed Trump-skeptical Republicans like to talk about how it’s important to preserve some room to maneuver so that when Trump eventually leaves the stage, the hard work of rebuilding the Republican party can begin.

I understand that sentiment. It sounds prudent. It might even be right.

But that view is predicated on the realities of politics as they existed in 2015.

Until Trump’s election, the working model for American politics was that parties were ideological organizations, not personality cults, and that ex-presidents were seldom seen and never heard.

The post-Trump future may be different: A world where the former president calls into cable shows while tweeting 150 times a day, settling scores, attacking members of his party who he deems insufficiently loyal and paving the way for his son to inherit the office.

---

If you think about the nature of political parties, the Trumpian view makes a certain amount of sense and what’s remarkable is that the old system lasted for as long as it did. Why is it, exactly, that former presidents have not chosen to actively maintain a grip on their political parties?

The only real explanations for the view of presidents as political stewards are humility, tradition, honor. Even Trump’s most eager apologists would never ascribe any of those traits to him. Why would he think himself constrained by such outmoded thinking?

Why would he voluntarily give up a thing of immense value?

When you look at Trump’s administration it is clear that he sees the GOP not as a political party which exists as a vehicle to execute policy visions, but an asset. And assets exist to be controlled and passed down to one’s heirs.

In such a world, the Republican party is a kingdom and GOP politicians are mere feudal lords who may only set up their own fiefdoms at the pleasure of the sovereign. Or, if you’d prefer a less benign metaphor, the Republican party is now a family-controlled syndicate which will run the business until either a rival gang takes them down or the feds catch up with them.

Whichever view you choose, the arrangement will continue as long as Donald Trump has thumbs and a smartphone.

Once you understand what the future of the Republican party must necessarily look like, the present makes a lot more sense.