Then he also said, I have a big enough job to do as the speaker of the House. But of course, your job as speaker of the House is partially to conduct oversight over the executive branch, whether or not the executive branch is run by a member of your own party. And he made little effort to disguise the fact that Republican or Republican-controlled Congress is really unlikely to investigate a Republican president no matter what the issue is. So when a reporter put this to him directly, he said, “Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed.” And of course, that is not the standard that he would follow if Joe Biden were president—or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. They wouldn’t say, Well, so far as I know, they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. They would say, We’re going to look into it and we’re going to see if they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. But they don’t seem to have any intention of doing that, at least right now. If pressure is brought to bear—by Democrats potentially but more notably by Republicans—then perhaps that would change.

Sargent: Sure looks as if Republicans are going to have a tough time holding this off because, as you point out, the argument is so preposterous. The idea that the fact that he’s doing it out in the open somehow absolves him of corruption seems pretty weak because (a) we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes in his discussions between him and Qatar and (b) it’s becoming an argument against scrutinizing the whole thing even more deeply, which would reveal more. That just doesn’t make any sense on its face, does it?

Berman: No, but honestly that’s been his secret sauce: taking advantage of especially the media’s preference for reporting what happens behind closed doors as if it is worse than what happens out in the open. And whether intentionally or not, he’s recognized that—and therefore he just names what is usually unmentionable in the past. He says the quiet thing out loud as they say. And by doing so, it seems—at least to his Republican allies—that, well, if he’s talking about it and if he’s public about it, then there can’t be anything wrong with it. But that’s not how it works, right? It doesn’t matter whether … If you announce that you are robbing a bank, it doesn’t make it any less illegal than if you go into the bank without announcing it beforehand.