Collingwood on Inference: Any Impeachment Relevance?

Not the edition I used for quotes, but the better cover

The following quote from R. G. Collingwood's An Autobiography (1938) comes from his chapter about his archeological fieldwork in Roman Britain. Collingwood promotes and practices a method of question and answer. You must ask a question to receive a fitting answer. In archeology, one works with coins and shards and the like. Historians deal with texts. Collingwood argues that one should not limit one's conclusions to only what the text says (or doesn't say) or what the coin reveals directly. In fact, a text, for instance, may not address an issue at all. For instance, Caesar doesn't state his reasons for invading Britain. So are we hopeless? Collingwood argues that we're not hopelessly stranded; in fact, he provides a mildly mocking parody of such an attitude. He writes: 

People who do not understand historical thinking, but are obsessed by scissors and paste, will say: ‘It is useless to raise the question, because if your only information comes from Caesar, and Caesar has not told you his plans, you cannot ever know what they were.’ These are the people who, if they met you one Saturday afternoon with a fishing-rod, creel, and campstool, walking towards the river, would ask: ‘Going fishing?’ And I suppose that if they were serving on a jury when some one was tried for attempted murder because he had put arsenic in his wife’s tea on Monday, and cyanide of potassium in her coffee on Tuesday, and on Wednesday broke her spectacles with a revolver-bullet, and knocked a piece out of her right ear with another on Thursday, and now pleaded not guilty, they would press for his acquittal because as he never admitted that he meant to murder her there could be no evidence that he did mean to. 

Collingwood, R. G.. An Autobiography . Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

To bring a text to life, I like to challenge myself to think of contemporary examples. For example, instead of Caesar, whom we might consider an example today? In place of "attempted murder," and the indicia of attempted murder, might we use "bribery, extortion, or attempting to leverage private gain by sacraficing the national interest"?

I've attempted to be a bit coy in my thinking in hopes of loosening the sticky locks we find on some minds. What Collingwood is arguing is that we make reasonable inferences about intent (purpose) based upon the evidence. Such inferences are vital in the law and play a role in many cases. Rarely, if ever, would a jury not receive instructions from a judge about determining intent based upon inferences constructed from the testimony and exhibits and the "circumstances surrounding the act" (i.e., context). As an example, here is the standard Iowa jury instruction about finding "intent" in a criminal case: 

200.2 Specific Intent - Definition And Proof.

"Specific intent" means not only being aware of doing an act and doing it voluntarily, but in addition, doing it with a specific purpose in mind. Because determining the defendant's specific intent requires you to decide what [he] [she] was thinking when an act was done, it is seldom capable of direct proof. Therefore, you should consider the facts and circumstances surrounding the act to determine the defendant's specific intent. You may, but are not required to, conclude a person intends the natural results of [his] [her] acts. [Emphasis added.]

I make a point of this because many of President Trump's defenders in Congress, having heard the testimony taken in front of the Intelligence Committee and statements made in public (such as admissions by Mulvaney and Guiliani) have nevertheless argued that there is no direct proof, no smoking gun, and other such arguments to prove President Trump's intent to coerce Ukraine to investigate his rival and pursue a theory that pins 2016 election interference on Ukraine instead of Russia. There may be direct evidence in the issue of intent, but because of the refusal of the WH and State Department and various individuals to comply with congressional subpoenas (a form of obstruction of justice, right?), we can't act on that information. So further decisions by the House and probably the Senate will have to make some inferences, and the question will be whether those inferences are reasonable, or instead prove the equivalent of "Going fishing?"