I once lived in Jersey — not the Atlantic state but the Channel Island tax haven. Sadly, it wasn’t because of opulent wealth. London finance houses dodged the taxman with the polite fiction that they were headquartered in Jersey and their big city offices were merely branches. Back in the day, this required a kabuki dance known as “mirror telexing.” London HQ telexed a “suggestion” to Jersey about buying shares, for example, and Jersey would telex back, bosslike, instructing London to do the deal. It was all about creating a fanciful paper trail to look aboveboard.

I suspect that something like mirror telexing has been used to gloss over a grubby procedure in efforts to impeach President Trump.