During Friday’s testimony another piece of history got made: The president, in real time, weighed in with a tweet about the witness while she was being questioned, a move that would not only have been impossible at any other historical time but very unadvisable, since it had the appearance of witness intimidation—as the committee chairman quickly pointed out.

So what will future history books say about the first time a president used Twitter to dig himself deeper into a hole during his own impeachment hearings? We don’t know yet, but it’s clear from their answers that we are in the midst of proceedings as singular and disruptive as the president who keeps finding a way to surprise all of us. Every impeachment is a totally new beast, and as only the fourth impeachment process to hit this point in 230 years, it’s certain we’ll see far more made soon. Here’s what we’ve seen so far.

Rather, the House Intelligence Committee—and all its members—represent both the public at large and the legislative branch of the national government, co-equal with the presidency, and charged by the Constitution with monitoring the conduct of the president, checking him when required and impeaching him as a last resort. This is not to suggest that impeachment of a president is ever a dispassionately apolitical affair. Those of the president’s faction will always look skeptically on efforts to remove the executive branch leader of their political “team.” Alexander Hamilton foresaw this in his essay Federalist 65. And any reasonable appreciation of human nature would predict the same thing.

But a striking fact about the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachments is the degree to which legislators of both parties generally demonstrated a commendable dedication to determining the facts and thereafter to arguing reasonable inferences from whatever facts emerged.

For example, in both the Nixon and Clinton cases, the parties were united in their resolution that the president must provide relevant evidence when requested by Congress in the impeachment inquiry. It is inconceivable that, in either case, the president’s party would have refused to join requests for White House witnesses or documents and then argue that the case against the president could not be proven because of the absence of the very witnesses or documents the President withheld. Yet that is precisely the position the Republicans have assumed in the Trump hearings, arguing, for instance, that the whistleblower’s complaints amount to “hearsay.”

“This is the first impeachment investigation that a citizen can watch unfold in real time”

Timothy Naftali is a professor of public service at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Initially, presidential impeachments came roughly a century apart, making them the very rare national crises that, I suspect, the Founders expected them to be. But now a portion of the American population is living through the third impeachment of their lifetimes. That fact alone deserves a moment’s reflection as we consider how the first week of the constitutional investigation of Donald J. Trump stacks up against its two modern predecessors, Nixon’s (1973-1974) and Clinton’s (1998-99).

Even those of us with two impeachments under our belts have never seen anything quite like this one. Besides the modern procedural innovation that this time the House Judiciary Committee is not in charge of all aspects of the inquiry, this is also the first impeachment investigation that a citizen (let alone a member of Congress) can watch unfold in real time. In the Clinton era, the public practically learned the whole case for the prosecution at once, when the House dumped Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s salacious report, unedited, on the web. In the Nixon era, the televised Senate Watergate Hearings and the very public struggle that ensued between the White House and the Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox introduced the public to a lot of the data points of presidential misconduct and issues of possible criminality but neither the Senate nor the special prosecutor initially had impeachment as their goal. It was the Saturday Night Massacre a few months later that led to impeachment. The House Judiciary Committee that ultimately impeached Nixon did most of its work in closed sessions, only publicly revealing the additional important tapes and documents it had collected once the members had largely made up their minds and their televised debate had started.

Of all the presidential impeachment inquiries, this is the one that transcends politics the most

Allan J. Lichtman is a history professor and author of The Case for Impeachment.

Never before has a presidential impeachment inquiry focused so heavily on U.S. foreign policy. That matters because the hearings this week, which involved more big-picture questions about national security than domestic affairs, transcended politics—or at least should have—more than any of the earlier hearings.

All prior impeachments of presidents involved domestic matters. In 1868, the House impeached President Andrew Johnson for obstructing Reconstruction. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon for defying congressional subpoenas, and for obstructing justice and abusing power in domestic political events. In 1998, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for covering up a consensual sexual affair. Both Nixon and Clinton refrained from inserting themselves personally into the impeachment process.

Yovanovitch testified that the damage wrought by such McCarthy-style politics extends far beyond her reputation and career. She said that “shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an American ambassador who does not give them what they want.” “Such conduct undermines the U.S., exposes our friends and widens the playing field for autocrats like President Putin,” she continued.

During her testimony, we saw something else that was unprecedented: Trump himself intervened, tweeting, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.” In real time, Trump was proving himself capable of the kind of national security sabotage Kent sounded the alarm on just two days earlier.

Future votes on impeachment might fall heavily along partisan lines, but the hearings this week made it clear that Trump’s conduct had an impact that rose far beyond political considerations and affected all Americans.

Oddly enough, when Johnson was impeached in 1868, you might say he was up to the same thing. The deciding issue for the House, which voted overwhelmingly to impeach him, was Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Recently passed by Congress but of dubious constitutionality, the act intended to stop Johnson from firing his secretary of war, who was in charge of the military. The military had recently been tasked to protect black men and their white allies, particularly at the polls where, in 1868, black men in the South could cast a vote for the first time.

Johnson, a southern Democrat, did not want black men enfranchised in the South, despite Congress’ recent law granting them the vote. In this sense, you could say he too was thinking of his own interests rather than those of the nation. (When Ulysses S. Grant ran for president in 1868, black men in the South ensured his election—and by that time, Johnson, who had been impeached, wasn’t even nominated by either party.)

In his testimony, Taylor said that suspending military aid to Ukraine was wrong. Ukraine, after all, is a country struggling against years of Soviet domination, and it’s a fledgling democracy eager to align itself with the West and its stated values of freedom and self-determination. And so the decision to suspend aid is as wrong as it was to disregard, or perhaps implicitly encourage, the violence in the American South right after the Civil War when another albeit undeclared war was waged upon black people and their white allies.

Not so this time. The open hearings on Wednesday and on Friday center on the withholding—for partisan purposes—of national security aid to a vulnerable country, as well as on an effort to involve foreign actors in domestic political machinations.

Second, while former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was testifying in open session on Friday, the president of the United States tweeted a screed against her—the very woman he’d removed from her post in Kyiv after a smear campaign from Rudy Giuliani and others had accused her of failing to press the Ukrainian government to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump wrote. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” Blaming Somalia’s future woes on a woman who was, back then, a junior foreign service officer not only boggled minds, it also prompted Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff to say, “What we saw was witness intimidation in real time by the president of the United States.” Rep. Mike Quigley remarked, “The president continues to obstruct.”

Johnson, Nixon and Clinton didn’t have Twitter on hand when Congress went through their respective motions of impeachment. If they had possessed such a tool, even the mercurial and impulsive Johnson, who nevertheless recognized the severity of the situation, probably would have held himself back from attacking a live witness during impeachment proceedings. Trump, of course, did not—or could not. And the forthcoming articles of impeachment may reflect that difference.

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