Forget the committee’s opening vow to establish that Trump masterminded a multipart conspiratorial enterprise. Here, the committee can’t even prove its basic point. The truth of the matter is that Trump intended to disrupt the transition of power. The committee has not come close to proving — much less proving beyond a reasonable doubt — that he intended disruption of the peaceful transition of power.

This salient distinction is easily missed because it cannot be gainsaid that the peaceful transition of power was disrupted. There was a riot, after all. It was carried out by Trump supporters. They assaulted security forces, injuring scores of police. They also smashed windows, broke through doors, and generally caused a nontrivial amount of physical damage to the facility (although Congress was able to reconvene a few hours later, since these rioters did not firebomb a federal facility, as left-wing radicals in Portland repeatedly did, nor burn the place to the ground and kill a person, as left-wing radicals in Minnesota did).

Nevertheless, the hole in the committee’s case has always been a criminally actionable nexus between Trump and the violence. There isn’t one.

That is worth keeping in the forefront of our minds as we assess the soliloquy that capped Monday’s committee theater …