The White House says that former national security adviser John Bolton’s book contains top secret information in a letter addressed to his attorney that was publicly released Wednesday.
The state of play: The development, first reported by CNN’s Jake Tapper, sets up a potential legal battle between Bolton and the White House over the book’s publication, which is currently scheduled for March 17.
Rep. Adam Schiff, lead House manager of the impeachment case against President Donald Trump, delivered a tour de force last week, painfully, crushingly detailing the president’s obvious guilt and decimating his defenses. It’s fair to say, however, that this did not go over all that agreeably with Senate Republicans who, determined to sidestep the evidence of Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, opted for phony professions of outrage at being called to account.
Leading the charge was Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), whose depressing forfeiture of a once-meaningful reputation for independence has led former admirers to shake their heads at what fear of a Republican primary can do to a person’s conscience. Collins claimed to be appalled at Congressman Jerry Nadler’s use of the phrase “cover-up” to describe conduct by Senate Republicans that can’t easily be described otherwise. Trump’s “defense” of the mountain of evidence against him is the patently false assertion that none of it is “first-hand.” But Republicans have not merely looked the other way at Trump’s blanket order that the documents reflecting his conduct be withheld and the aides to whom he gave orders be gagged; presented with a simple request that the documents be turned over and the aides be required to tell the truth, they made the request impossible. For his part, the president does not hide the fact that he is hiding the facts. “We’re doing very well,” Trump boasted about the impeachment proceedings last week. “(H)onestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”
Collins is upset about the phrase “cover-up.” Too bad. That is precisely what it is, and her objection to a phrase that fits the GOP’s conduct like a glove makes her look ridiculous. Evidently, in the United States Senate, which Collins claims to revere, it is now permissible to block the truth and impermissible to speak it. Continue reading.
Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Wednesday admitted that literally nothing President Donald Trump may have done would justify removing him from office.
During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Collins said that Republican senators should reject hearing from witnesses in the president’s impeachment trial because nothing those witnesses could say would change the fact that Trump shouldn’t be impeached.
“I think at the end of the day, when they look at the total case, they look at how it was presented, and how badly it was done in the House, and how poorly these articles were drafted… witnesses are not going to help this!” he said. “No matter what happened, the president did nothing wrong!” Continue reading.
It isn’t hard to understand why so many of President Donald Trump’s defenders are hoping and praying that former National Security Advisor John Bolton will not testify during his impeachment trial. Bolton, according to the New York Times, alleges in his book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir that Trump and his colleagues did have a “quid pro quo” with the Ukrainian government — Ukraine would receive military aid from the U.S., but only if it investigated former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Axios reporter Alayna Treene examines the fallout from the Bolton bombshell in two separate articles published on Tuesday morning: one on the “domino effect” that Republicans fear if Bolton testifies, the other on the sense of urgency that Bolton is creating among Trump’s impeachment defense team.
Bolton’s book isn’t actually due out until March 17. But a manuscript of the book, Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt reported in the Times over the weekend, was leaked — and in that manuscript, Bolton alleges that Trump linked military aid to Ukraine with an investigation of the Bidens. That “quid pro quo,” House Democrats have been asserting, is an impeachable offense. Continue reading.
His legal team spent very little time actually vouching for his Ukraine conspiracy theories. Instead, they watered them downPresident Trump’s defense team ended an extended opening argument Tuesday in which it laid out that Trump had legitimate reasons to ask Ukraine for specific investigations.
But it spent almost no time vouching for the actual investigations he wanted.
To the extent that Trump’s team tried to argue that the investigations were legitimate, it focused mostly on the idea that Hunter Biden’s employment at a Ukrainian gas company was problematic. It spent considerably less time arguing for the theory that Trump actually raised with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on their July 25 phone call: that then-Vice President Joe Biden sought to help his son by pushing out Ukraine’s top prosecutor. Continue reading.
As pressure mounts to have former national security adviser John Bolton testify in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a pair of Republican senators is proposing an idea to stall and possibly block Bolton from speaking publicly about his knowledge of the Ukraine scandal.
In The Room Where It Happened, his forthcoming memoir about his time in the Trump White House, Bolton says Trump told him that he was withholding congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine until the country’s leadership announced an investigation into his political rivals. That is exactly what Democrats charge Trump with doing, calling that quid pro quo an abuse of power.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and James Lankford (R-OK) suggested a deal that would allow senators to review Bolton’s book in a classified setting before deciding on whether to have him testify. Continue reading.
The headline drew little notice when it appeared last spring on a blog called “Disobedient Media.”
“John Bolton Took Money From Banks Tied To Cartels, Terrorists, Iran,” it read.
On Monday, the blog entry gained sudden popularity. That’s because its central claim — based only on innuendo and half-truths — proved useful to President Trump’s most fervent online supporters, who rushed to discredit the former United Nations ambassador and national security adviser as news broke that his forthcoming book would corroborate accounts that the president held up aid to Ukraine to advance investigations into his domestic political rivals. Continue reading.
Senate Republicans emerged from a closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday voicing renewed confidence that they will bypass a nasty witness fight in the impeachment trial.
“The consensus is that we’ve heard enough and it’s time to go to a final judgement,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters.
Asked if the trial proceedings should go past Friday, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), another member of Senate GOP leadership, said it “shouldn’t.” Continue reading.
Fox News’ Chris Wallace slammed conservative pundit Katie Pavlich on air, telling her to “Get your facts straight” after she tried to claim all kinds of made-up facts in her defense of Donald Trump. In question was Pavlich’s revisionist retelling of how the Democratic House’s impeachment inquiry was hampered by obstruction. In Pavlich’s imagineering, the Democratic Party is breaking with impeachment tradition by pushing an incomplete case, “and every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate. So there are questions here about the process.”
That’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true, and Wallace cut Pavlich off to tell her as much: “They hadn’t all been called in the House, and in the Clinton impeachment, they’d been called by the general independent counsel. They had not been called by the House.”
Right-wing pundit Katie Pavlich is just the kind of dumb that Trump’s Republican Party loves: willing to toe any line of misinformation, no matter how many obvious facts and contradictions there are. Appearing on Fox News with conservative luminaries such as Brett Baier, Pavlich was promoting the old conservative trope that the difference between Clinton’s impeachment trial and Trump’s is that the Democratic Party keeps trying to add new things to it, because it’s going so terribly. The basis of this bit of bullshit is that Donald Trump’s White House has refused to allow anyone to testify, while his Department of Justice has done more work trying to cover up his criminal behavior than any of the actual work it’s supposed to do as a department. Continue reading.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday slammed a proposal floated by GOP senators to review former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished book manuscript in a classified setting, calling the idea “absurd.”
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on Monday night said the White House should give senators access to Bolton’s draft book, which claims President Trumplinked security assistance for Ukraine with an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden. Lankford said the manuscript could be viewed in the Senate’s sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).
The highly secure room located in the basement level of the Capitol Visitor Center is usually used for classified briefings or to review sensitive intelligence and national security documents. Continue reading.
