THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The lawyers brought the issue to Trump because they were determining if they legally had to inform Congress of the complaint.

This new timeline suggests that Trump was aware that he had been accused of abusing his executive power when the White House eventually released the aid to Ukraine in September. It also paints his I'm-not-a-crook correspondence with U.N. Ambassador Gordon Sondland in a less honorable light. Sondland testified that 0n September 9, Trump told him "I want no quid pro quo." That Trump was aware that an intelligence officer had accused him of such behavior -- after spending a summer "enthusiastically" pressuring Ukraine to conduct investigations that would aid his reelection -- suggests that the conversation with Sondland, who testified that there was a quid pro quo, was meant more as a bailout plan than as an honest confession to a U.N. ambassador in over his head. And as Daily Kos points out, there's a smaller concern related to the choice of language from the president with a limited vocabulary: "Trump using such precise language without being prompted was always a question mark because he clearly doesn't bat around Latin phrases very often."

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