And it still hasn’t worked. No more than the Ken Star “Independent Investigation” washed Republicans’ hands clean of the Clinton Impeachment.

The point isn’t to wash their hands of it, but to limit the scope of the inevitable protests. If the case is fucking airtight, and Trump has been fully allowed to engage in every possible defensive argument he and his lawyers can think of, and a jury that definitely isn’t just a bunch of Democrats who already hate Trump unanimously agree that the evidence proves he did it and all of this is thoroughly transparent and public then the resulting pool protests will draw from will just be the really fervent members of his cult. The more it has the appearances of just being a political attack, the larger the scale of the protests will be, and the bigger the protests are the more destructive and larger scale any violence from them is likely to be.