(Bloomberg Opinion) -- You can’t say that President Donald Trump’s impeachment-defense team is too focused on the news cycle. Despite the John Bolton bombshell Sunday night, Trump’s lawyers on Monday plowed ahead as if nothing of interest had happened since the Senate heard the beginning of their presentations on Saturday.

This created something of a bizarro-world trial, in which the president’s lawyers argued that none of the witnesses who testified at House impeachment hearings last month had first-hand evidence that could directly tie Trump to the effort to squeeze help for his 2020 re-election campaign from the government of Ukraine. Yes, the lawyers contended, some of the witnesses believed that Trump was holding up a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and congressionally approved security aid to Ukraine until that nation announced investigations into the 2016 election and a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, but none of them had heard it from the president.

And yet even before the New York Times reported over the weekend that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in an upcoming book that he heard Trump make the link directly, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had attested in an October press conference to exactly that kind of quid pro quo (a few days later he said he’d been misconstrued, but please). Indeed, since the president’s team is fighting hard to prevent either Bolton or Mulvaney from testifying to the Senate after successfully preventing either of them from appearing before the House committees that looked into impeachment, they’re actually doing more than ignoring the evidence: They’re actively suppressing it. And the Trump case also requires ignoring — or, perhaps, creatively interpreting — all the rest of the available evidence, including things that Trump has said publicly and things Trump said to Zelenskiy.

After that, the Trump lawyers turned to where they always were headed: To attacking Biden, the current polling leader for the Democratic presidential nomination. Generating bad publicity for Biden was one of the two major goals of the Trump-Ukraine plot (along with somehow recasting the story of Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. election). If it couldn’t happen by pushing Ukraine’s president to announce a criminal investigation of Biden, they would have to settle for doing it during the impeachment trial.

Speaking of bizarro world, two of Trump’s lawyers — Pam Bondi and Eric Herschmann — hauled out the video clip in which Biden bragged in 2018 that while he was vice president, he helped engineer the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Victor Shokin. Republicans have waded disingenuously into that tangled tale to accuse Biden of trying to thwart a Ukrainian investigation into the activities of his son, Hunter, as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company. The truth is the opposite: Shokin was pushed out under unified pressure from U.S. and European officials because he wasn’t pursuing corruption investigations.Still, at the impeachment trial Herschmann ridiculed the idea that it could ever have been U.S. policy to push Shokin out. In fact, of course, it was U.S. and international policy, with support from plenty of Republicans at the time. Making that argument, at this point, was simply an insult to everyone’s intelligence.