Legal analysis of the clown show

Here's an extended Washington Post excerpt on Hot Air: "WaPo Columnist: Who Does Schiff Think He’s Kidding On Trial Analogies?"

The House’s articles have been analogized to an indictment, but indictments can only be brought if they are sanctioned by a neutral, disinterested party. A prosecutor must persuade either a judge or a grand jury that there is probable cause a defendant committed a crime to initiate a case. No serious person can call the House Democratic caucus a neutral, disinterested party.

Nor can a prosecutor obtain evidence under subpoena on their whim. Anyone with a subpoena to provide testimony or written evidence can challenge that in court, as many recipients of such subpoenas in investigations supervised by the office of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did. That is exactly what the president has tried to do in many instances with respect to subpoenas issued by committees controlled by House Democrats. But Schiff and his colleagues not only chose not to permit the judicial process to play out with respect to those subpoenas; they chose to call the president’s attempt to avail himself of his rights “obstruction of Congress” and an impeachable offense itself. How Orwellian.

There's a lot here including how the GAO's dramatic announcement that Trump's action on Ukrainian aid was "illegal" is a non-expert opinion that is ultimately a civil action, not a criminal one.  The brave firefighters in the media failed to report that non-trivial distinction but why should we expect anything different at this point.