John Bolton wants to testify – Republicans want to prevent him from testifying

As the Washington Post editorialized, The impeachment evidence will catch up to Republicans and Trump — whether they ignore it or not. Drip, drip, drip… Anita Kumar explains, “It’s not impeachment that’s worrying Republicans. It’s the months of steady revelations about the Ukraine saga that could follow.” Forget impeachment. Republicans fear Ukraine revelations could spill into election. And whose fault would that be?

In our last episode of “As The Stomach Churns,” Lev Parnas released a videotape of Donald Trump corroborating his story about the smear campaign against Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “I don’t know the man” Trump says … and yet, there you are buddy, plotting with Lev and his pals on tape.

Today’s episode of “As The Stomach Churns” comes via former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose manuscript (or selected portions thereof) of his tell-all book of his time in the Trump White House was leaked to the New York Times.

For its part, the National Security Council says no other White House staffers saw Bolton manuscript:

“Ambassador Bolton’s manuscript was submitted to the NSC for pre-publication review and has been under initial review by the NSC. No White House personnel outside NSC have reviewed the manuscript.”

— National Security Council spokesperson John Ullyot

In other words, “We didn’t share it with the president’s legal team, we pinky swear!”

Bolton’s lawyer begs to differ. The Times reports:

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book’s contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said Sunday night.

He said he provided a copy of the book to the White House on Dec. 30 — 12 days after Mr. Trump was impeached — to be reviewed for classified information, though, he said, Mr. Bolton believed it contained none.

The submission to the White House may have given Mr. Trump’s aides and lawyers direct insight into what Mr. Bolton would say if he were called to testify at Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.

Anyway, the mustachioed Neocon war monger John Bolton in the manuscript of his book corroborates the State Department witnesses who testified under oath that security aid to Ukraine was withheld and was made contingent upon Ukraine announcing an investigation into the 2016 election and into Joe and Hunter Biden, i.e., a quid pro quo, or the historical meaning of “bribery” as set forth in the impeachment clause of the Constitution.

The Times reports, Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says:

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

* * *

Multiple people described Mr. Bolton’s account of the Ukraine affair.

The book presents an outline of what Mr. Bolton might testify to if he is called as a witness in the Senate impeachment trial, the people said. The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

Yeah, I previously explained this earlier this year. Why John Bolton suddenly wants to testify in the Senate impeachment trial:

[T]he salacious details Bolton wants to “tell all” about in his book are almost certainly highly classified and he is required to submit the draft of his book to the intelligence agencies for review and a declassification process. The Trump administration has no incentive to be cooperative in this process, and can drag out the declassification process indefinitely, certainly past the election.

So what is an Iran war hawk looking for a payday from a “tell all” book that only has a limited time of value before the election to do?

By testifying before Congress, Bolton can rely on the speech and debate clause for putting classified matters into the public record without facing legal action. It will be a bit of a “spoiler alert” for his book, but it may be his only option to sell his book this year.

Just after midnight on Monday, President Trump wrote on Twitter (but of course) denying he ever told Bolton that the aid was tied to investigations. Just like he denied knowing Lev Parnas (see above), and denied knowing anything about his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, for which he is named as “individual-1” in the indictment of his fixer, Michael Cohen, who “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”

The betting window is now open to take bets on how long it will take Trump to deny that he even knows John Bolton. He eventually does this with all of his incriminating co-conspirators.

The Times continues:

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.

Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call.

For his part, William “Coverup” Barr “denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.” This is the same guy who wrote a bullshit summary of the Mueller Report to distract from the findings of the actual report, and is currently in contempt of Congress for not complying with subpoenas. He is also pursuing political vendettas against Trump’s political “enemies list” for the Russia investigation. This guy is your character witness?

[T]he acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.

During a previously reported May 23 meeting where top advisers and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, briefed him about their trip to Kyiv for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton.

* * *

Key to Mr. Bolton’s account about Ukraine is an exchange during a meeting in August with the president after Mr. Trump returned from vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Bolton raised the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine for its war in the country’s east against Russian-backed separatists. Officials had frozen the aid, and a deadline was looming to begin sending it to Kyiv, Mr. Bolton noted.

He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them, airing his longstanding grievances about Ukraine, which mixed legitimate efforts by some Ukrainians to back his Democratic 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with unsupported accusations and outright conspiracy theories about the country, a key American ally.

In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.

* * *

Mr. Bolton also described other key moments in the pressure campaign, including Mr. Pompeo’s private acknowledgment to him last spring that Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ms. Yovanovitch had no basis and that Mr. Giuliani may have wanted her removed because she might have been targeting his clients who had dealings in Ukraine as she sought to fight corruption.

Mr. Bolton also said he warned White House lawyers that Mr. Giuliani might have been leveraging his work with the president to help his private clients.

John Bolton does have another option to tell his story. If he really does want to be a patriot and to tell his story before lawless Republicans shut down the impeachment trial without hearing from any witnesses, he can call his favorite reporter at his favorite television news network and offer to give an exclusive interview. As long as he stays away from discussing genuinely classified information, he can tell his story in broad strokes without risking being prosecuted for revealing classified information. John Bolton strikes me as being sophisticated enough to thread this needle. He can corroborate that “everyone was in the loop.”

Philip Bump analyzes at the Washington Post, Trump’s legal team outlined its case. One day later, John Bolton appears to have kneecapped it.

The emergence of a second potential witness who could be precisely what Trump’s legal team said didn’t exist is hugely problematic for Senate Republicans. Attorney Michael Purpura’s phrasing was carefully and cleverly tailored to exclude Mick Mulvaney, but it now introduces the counterpoint: If the important thing is solely that the testimony implicating Trump be from sworn witnesses, how does one argue against having Mulvaney and Bolton be sworn witnesses? Bolton in particular — given that he has already expressed an interest in offering testimony to the Senate.

Trump’s lawyers and the Senate Republicans inclined to support him are in a bind. They have to either ignore the Times report (which Bolton’s team doesn’t dispute) and leave obviously damning evidence on the table — a big problem for purple-state senators who need to argue that no stone was left unturned — or they have to open the floodgates to new testimony and evidence. Trump’s legal team, meanwhile, has to make a choice: continue using careful language to wave away what happened or subtly pivot to making the case that what happened doesn’t merit removing Trump from office.

Everyone is doing “listicle” analyis today. See Noah Weiland at the New York Times, 5 Takeaways on Trump and Ukraine From John Bolton’s Book; the Post’s Jennifer Rubin, Eight ways Bolton has changed the trial and boxed in Republicans; the Post’s Greg Sargent, Four big takeaways from the explosive John Bolton revelations.

But the only point that really matters, is this enough to get four Republican Senators to join Democrats to call witnesses, particularly John Bolton, to testify? While some key GOP senators say reports on Bolton book bolster case for witnesses in impeachment trial, they are notoriously unreliable wimps.

Republicans may stick to their game plan to put on a sham impeachment trial without hearing from witnesses, for the first time in U.S. history. George Conway III explains Bolton’s testimony would be devastating. Not even Republicans could look away.

From Trump on down, they all know how damning Bolton’s testimony would be to Trump’s defense. Indeed, the leak of what’s in Bolton’s book shows how disingenuous the president’s defense has been.

Before the Senate on Saturday, deputy White House counsel Michael Purpura laid out the elements of that defense. Key among them: “Not a single witness testified that the President himself said there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a Presidential meeting, or anything else.”

He continued: “Most of the Democrats’ witnesses have never spoken to the President at all, let alone about Ukraine security assistance.” And: “The Democrats’ entire quid pro quo theory is based on nothing more than the initial speculation of one person” — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.

If Bolton testifies to what’s in his manuscript, these arguments, weak as they are, will collapse. The words will come from Trump’s mouth, because Bolton will have put them there. The direct witness whose absence Trump’s lawyers trumpeted will have appeared.

And that witness would destroy the central defense Trump’s lawyers have raised. Which is that the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was perfect — factually, legally, and constitutionally.

As Conway concludes, “In light of Trump’s own arguments, it would now be preposterous, if it ever wasn’t, for the Senate not to call Bolton as a witness. To refuse to do so would ensure that the trial would be recorded forever in history as a GOP-orchestrated farce.”

Yet this remains the most likely outcome this week.