The NPR Politics Podcast - John Bolton Casts Shadow Over Trump Impeachment Defense

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

As President Trump's legal team continues their case for acquittal, a report in The New York Times about an alleged conversation between Trump and Bolton — contained in a draft of the former national security adviser's book manuscript — could change the equation for some senators who are undecided on calling witnesses.And, Joe Biden and Rudy Giuliani were both discussed at length today as the president's lawyers attempt to reframe and undercut the arguments made by Democratic House impeachment managers.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We are one week away from the Iowa caucuses, and this Friday we're going to be live in Des Moines to break down everything you need to know before the big day. Join us by grabbing a ticket at nprpresents.org. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 7.16 p.m. on Monday, January 27th. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress.. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. The president's legal team continues its defense of President Trump in the Senate impeachment trial.

But before we get to that, we have to talk about a major plot twist that just about every senator was asked about today. Well, just about every senator who was willing to talk to us. Right. Every senator who didn't evade you in the hallways of the Capitol. So, Ryan, tell us what this is. There was this New York Times story that essentially said that the president's former national security adviser, John Bolton, has some things that he would share that would undermine part of the president's defense. That's right. John Bolton has some things that he would share that would undermine part of the president's defense. That's right. John Bolton is writing a book. There's a manuscript that he shared with the National Security Council. And the New York Times says that it spoke to people who had reviewed it.

And what Bolton alleges in this book is that President Trump told him in August of 2019 that Trump wanted to continue to hold around $400 million in aid to Ukraine until the Ukrainian government helped in investigations of Democrats, including Joe Biden. This is a big deal because it is a firsthand witness, if this is accurate, who could testify that President Trump was directly linking the aid to the investigations. Which is the central allegation in the abusive power article of these two articles of impeachment. I mean, he could be a key witness if they decide to call him in the Senate. And that's what you were asking all these senators about today, right, Kelsey?

We were. Basically, any time a senator walked by, a horde of reporters followed along to ask about Bolton. And there was kind of a choose your own adventure way of approaching this. There were people who decided that, you know, they hadn't read what Bolton had to say. It was too new. They needed time to digest it. There was the group of people who said, well, Bolton didn't say anything that was new and we our minds are unchanged. And then there was a group of people who said that they were willing to hear from witnesses. By and large, though, the people who outright committed to wanting to hear from witnesses and potentially wanting to hear from Bolton were people who already said they might want to hear from witnesses and might want to hear from Bolton. And that would be like the Mitt Romneys, the Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski's. Right. And, you know, there are some other people out there who have shown a willingness to consider the concept of witnesses or people who wanted to be entirely silent about that, because I actually think that is ones who are most likely to be winnable by either side. So we're talking about Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. I think Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania

is another one we haven't heard from. Rob Portman of Ohio. The list of people who have been silent is long enough that it could tip the balance between witnesses and no witnesses. And one of the reasons that this would matter is that a key part of President Trump's defense is this idea that Democrats have made their case without any based on hearsay, without any sort of firsthand account of what the president wanted. And they've also insisted that the president wasn't linking the funding to these investigations. This would undermine that. The interesting thing is that this big explosive article comes out the night before the arguments and then the president's lawyers go to the Senate chamber to make their arguments. And it's as if the article never came out. The only tiny glimpse of an acknowledgement came from Jay Sekulow, one of the president's private attorneys who's on the

legal team. We deal with transcript evidence. We deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all. And that was it. One, the allegations in that New York Times story about what Bolton might say are not part of the evidentiary record at this point in time. So there's no reason for them to really address it.

And two, you know, they are going to fight tooth and nail to try to keep anything that Bolton might have to say out of this trial whatsoever. They do not want to have to deal with the former national security advisor to the president who would have one-on-one conversations with him day in and day out, being able to come in and talk about what he knows. So one person that we did hear from today is Ken Starr. Now, he is almost synonymous with with the impeachment of Bill Clinton that happened in 1998 and into 1999.

And he went up on the Senate floor and essentially argued that, gosh, there's just been too much impeachment. Like war, impeachment is hell. Or at least presidential impeachment is hell. Those of us who lived through the presidential impeachment, is hell. Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment, including members of this body, full well understand that a presidential impeachment is tantamount to domestic war, albeit thankfully,

protected by our beloved First Amendment, a war of words and a war of ideas. But it's filled with acrimony and it divides the country like nothing else. And his suggestion was that the country needs to get back to their tradition of impeachment being something that rarely happens. It's the exception to everything as opposed to every 20 years, there's another impeachment. There are people who certainly would be supporters of President Clinton who would find that message coming from Ken Starr a little rich. There are certainly people in my inbox, Democrats and staffers, who have made that point very clearly and very loudly. Rudy Giuliani was someone who was mentioned by the House impeachment managers repeatedly. He is at the center of their case against President Trump and why what he was doing was in pursuit of his personal benefit and not the national interest.

And today, the president's legal team addressed that head on, in particular, Jane Raskin, who was part of President Trump's defense in the Russia investigation and is now part of the defense for impeachment. The House managers would have you believe that Mr. Giuliani is at the center of this controversy. They've anointed him the proxy villain of the tale, the leader of a rogue operation. Their presentations were filled with ad hominem attacks and name calling cold-blooded political operative political bag man but i suggest to you that he's front and center in their narrative for one reason and one reason alone to distract from the fact that the evidence does not support their claims so what do did they say Rudy Giuliani was doing? She's basically saying that Giuliani was working as a defense attorney for his client, the president,

to rebut the Mueller investigation. And he was not on a dirt digging expedition in Ukraine to try to tarnish Joe Biden. She says that the evidence just does not support that interpretation. What she's doing in this 15 minutes, though, is leaving out a whole bunch of information that would provide a much fuller picture of what it is that Rudy was up to. Of course, you want your defense attorneys to go out and present the best possible picture. And I think that's sort of what we got here today was, you know, almost a reverse image of what the Democrats had been arguing. So basically what we're talking about here is when we're looking at the same general picture, the same set of facts, but it's like looking at photo negatives. One side is arguing the photo color and the other one is arguing the negative. And it's it's it can be a little bit head snapping. All right. Let us take a quick break. And when we come back, Vice President Joe Biden was featured prominently in

the arguments today. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the Showtime docuseries, The Circus. Get a different perspective on the 2020 presidential campaign from hosts John Heilman, Alex Wagner, and Mark McKinnon as they go behind the scenes and beyond the headlines of one of the most important stories of our time. Don't miss The Circus, Sundays at 8, only on Showtime. What does it take to start something from nothing? And what does it take to actually build it? I'm Guy Raz. Every week on How I Built This,

I speak with founders behind some of the most inspiring companies in the world. NPR's How I Built This. Listen now. And we're back. And we also heard today from Pam Bondi. She is a longtime booster of President Trump. She is the former attorney general of the state of Florida. And her job was to talk about Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter and Burisma. That's the gas company that Hunter served on the board of. And of course, Burisma, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, President Trump asked in this now notorious phone call, asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and this gas company. They are here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that's why we have to talk about this today.

They say sham. They say baseless. Because they say this because if it's OK for someone to say, hey, you know what? Maybe there's something here worth raising. Then their case crumbles. This was essentially an hour and a half from Trump's defense team pushing all of the allegations that we have heard from Rudy Giuliani for the past year or so, they were using the Senate trial of President Trump and that stage to put forward these allegations once again. And, you know, I heard from a lot of Democrats who are saying that they weren't aware that a former vice president's son was the one on trial in the Senate today. Oh, he was for an hour and a half, that's for sure. And you saw the president's campaign and the White House tweeting very actively about this particular part of the argument.

And, you know, at essence, what she was saying, what Bondi was saying is like, all of this is fair game. Well, I mean, so Joni Ernst, who is a senator from Iowa, a Republican senator from Iowa, came down during the dinner break and went to this. There's this camera that's set up at the base of the escalators that go to the Capitol. And she walked to the camera and they was talking to reporters. And she said Iowa caucuses are next Monday. And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers. Will they be supporting the vice president at this point?

The goal of this one could be to obviously drag Biden down in Iowa and his political fortunes generally. But it's also to support this idea that the president was right to ask for the Ukrainian government to look into Burisma. This is a matter of corruption. The president is interested in corruption. But that doesn't address the bigger issue of everyone agrees corruption is endemic in Ukraine. It is a major problem. Both sides of the aisle will agree on that.

And Burisma has had some corruption problems in the past. Exactly. But it is unusual for a president to focus on one particular company in the vast constellation of corrupt companies and corruption issues in Ukraine. And that's where people say this isn't about corruption. This is about the Bidens. You know, I would also say that there's a possible third argument to be made for what she was trying to do here. And that was to give Republicans some ammo when they are having conversations about witnesses to say, look at the evidence that Pambandi presented, we should be calling Hunter Biden.

Which gets to probably my last question for today, which is, what comes next? And Kelsey, are you hearing talk on the Hill of possibly a witness trade? There have been some conversations about the concept of trading one Republican witness for one Democratic witness and having it all wrapped in together and walking onto the floor with that agreement sometime later this week. I have also heard very strong rejection of that plan on both sides. On the one hand, it would appear that having an agreement to say a one for one trade for specific witnesses would be everybody getting what they want. But it's also a pretty surefire way to alienate a whole bunch of people who say if you're a Republican and don't want to

hear from John Bolton, you're not going to vote for this deal. And if you're a Democrat and you don't want to hear from Hunter Biden, you're not going to vote for this deal. So it's like saying I'm interested in having witnesses, but only if I have a surefire opportunity to kill a vote for witnesses. So what comes next is in the immediate future. Y'all should listen to Up First, our sister podcast, which will tell you what happened in the rest of tonight's arguments. We're expecting more arguments from President Trump's legal team tomorrow. And that is a wrap for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.