Today, Explained - The Bolton's back in town

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Vox's Andrew Prokop explains why John Bolton’s leaked manuscript has upended the GOP’s hopes to wrap up the impeachment trial quickly without calling witnesses. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Ukraine explained. Depending on how you count it, today is day seven of President Trump's Senate impeachment trial. And on day seven, the trial hasn't yet made a boatload of progress. As of this morning, they were still trying to get through opening statements. But this week, President Trump's former national security mustache, John Bolton, waded into the debate in a way that might require that he's called as a witness against his former boss, President Trump. Vox's Andrew Prokop has been glued to the television since this whole thing began. And today he's going to take us through the motions, starting with the start. Hello. So the Democrats went first.

What did they have to say? So they took nearly 24 hours over three days to lay out their case. This was not an argument that was filled with new evidence or new bombshells, at least since last week. There was reference to some of the Lev Pardes evidence that came out recently. And putting all that together in an overall argument to the Republicans that Trump was very clearly guilty of abusing his power to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, in part by withholding aid in a White House meeting. And also that he obstructed Congress by doing this broad overall refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry at all. It's funny you mentioned greatest hits because didn't someone quote Notorious B.I.G., making it the first time that Notorious B.I.G. was quoted in a Senate impeachment trial?

Yes, that was Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. And we are here, sir, to follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution, and present the truth to the American people. That is why we are here, Mr. Sekulow. And if you don't know, now you know. So the Democrats didn't necessarily update very much of their status quo from what we saw in the House impeachment hearings. Yeah, they think they had a strong case already.

A spin that they put on it was that there were some gaps in the case and things they didn't know about, which they used to argue, this is why you should call witnesses. And when this was happening in the House, there were tons of contentious moments. Are contentious moments a thing in the Senate? So we've gotten fewer heated exchanges in part because the opening arguments are formatted in such a way that the House impeachment managers have 24 hours of Senate floor time spread over three days to make their case without being interrupted by any questioning from senators or response from Trump's legal team. We did see a testy back and forth on the first night of the trial, which was a rules debate where there was some of that back and forth between Trump's team and the Democrats. This was when Representative Jerry Nadler of New York suggested that the Senate would be engaged in a cover-up if they didn't vote to hear witnesses.

Any senator who votes against Ambassador Bolton's testimony or any relevant testimony shows that he or she wants to be part of the cover-up. What other possible reason is there to prohibit a relevant witness from testifying here? Unfortunately, so far I've seen every Republican senator has shown that they want to be part of the cover-up by voting against every document and witness proposed. And Republican senators went to reporters afterward and said they were absolutely outraged, shocked, shocked that anyone would suggest that there was a cover-up going on in this Senate.

Didn't Chief Justice John Roberts also reprimand Jerry Nadler for saying that? Yeah. So Trump's team gave their own testy response. And then Chief Justice Roberts spoke up and made what's pretty much been his only direct comment on the trial proceedings so far. In the 1905 Swain trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word pettifogging. And the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used. I don't think we need to aspire to that highest standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are. Cute. So that's kind of how the Democrats opened up. How did they close things out on Friday? So Schiff gave a long presentation, summing up everything they found, making the argument for witnesses, calling on Republican senators to represent moral courage. And then he referenced a report from

CBS News that the White House had supposedly warned Republican senators that vote against your president, vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike. Yikes. This was some rather lurid imagery. And the Republican senators said they did not like this one bit. In fact, as soon as Schiff said it, Susan Collins of Maine, one of the key swing votes of this entire thing, yelled out, that's not true. Several other Republicans groaned. Wait, she yelled that out in the Senate? Yes. Even though you are technically not supposed to speak under pain of imprisonment, she apparently felt so strongly that she reacted in that way. I'm surprised Chief Justice John Roberts didn't react to that. Well, this is pretty much the Senate's house.

So, you know, there are technically a set of rules about that everyone has to be in their seats, that no one is allowed to speak. And those rules have been pretty frequently violated. Senators have been chatting with each other, getting up, moving around, going outside to go on TV, all that. I think they should be sent to prison, Andrew. That's what the rules say. Got to follow the rules. OK, so that's the Democrats. How do President Trump's lawyers respond beginning on Saturday? So President Trump himself was not at all happy that the impeachment managers used all three days of their allotted time. He complained in a tweet that his opening arguments would have to start Saturday, which is Death Valley for TV ratings wise. So what they ended up doing on Saturday was agreeing to a shortened session where Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow called this a trailer for the testified that Donald Trump himself had personally tied withholding Ukraine aid to investigations. So then on Monday, we had the whole lineup of Trump's defense team roster making their case on the floor of the Senate.

You had Ken Starr, who gave this lengthy presentation. The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently. Indeed, we're living in what I think can aptly be described as the age of impeachment. That was a bit confusing. He seemed to be arguing that impeachment was bad. And he was sort of an odd messenger for that, given his role in Bill Clinton's impeachment. But anyway, you also had Alan Dershowitz making a case based on his reading of the Constitution. I will argue that our Constitution and its terms, high crimes and misdemeanors, do not encompass the two articles charging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. A lot of impeachment scholars disagree with him on this. And then there was Jane Raskin, who we haven't seen too much of, but she was one of Trump's lawyers in the Mueller probe, working with Rudy Giuliani and continues to represent Trump. And she defended Rudy Giuliani on the floor of the Senate. She said that 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. And then there was also the former Attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi, who used her section of time to argue that the Bidens and their connection to the natural gas company

Burisma really were corrupt and worthy of investigation. Hunter Biden's decision to join Burisma raised flags almost immediately. One article from May 2014 stated, the appointment of Joe Biden's son to the board of Ukrainian gas firm Burisma has raised eyebrows the world over. So how did Trump do anything wrong if all he wanted was people to

investigate corruption? And we should mention that there is no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong or corrupt in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor that's at the center of this. Was this basically what you expected? Yeah, it's pretty much what we would have expected. Trump's legal team has been surprisingly restrained, I would say. I think they are tailoring their arguments to the Republican senators on the fence. They're not putting on as wild of a show as the president himself might like to see. But yeah, you know, there are obviously elements of sniping and nastiness, but it's been overall relatively sober proceedings so far.

One point that Trump's legal team did keep coming back to was that no witness called by Democrats had ever testified that they heard or saw Donald Trump personally link the blocking of military aid to Ukraine to his demand for investigations. But all of that could change if a certain someone shows up? Yes. The problem with that argument is that we got news that there is a very well-known, high-profile, potential witness who very much wants to testify before the Senate, who would say just that, that he, in a conversation with Trump, saw Trump link the aid to Ukraine to investigations. And that would be former National Security Advisor John Bolton. More with Andrew and John and Sean in a minute on Today Explained.

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Okay, Andrew, remind me how John Bolton became the former national security advisor. Why did he and President Trump break up again? We all remember John Bolton, Republican, national security stalwart, super hawk, loves aggressive military action all over the world. And Trump brought him into the administration in March 2018 as national security advisor. But they ended up clashing in that role. He was very unhappy with Trump's relatively less interventionist instincts on Syria policy, on Afghanistan policy. And he also, it turns out, had a bit of a problem with Trump's effort to block $391 million in military aid to Ukraine. So due to some combination of all this, they had a falling out. And Bolton, depending on who you asked, either resigned or was fired in early September, which happened to be just as this Ukraine scandal was breaking. So this sort of will he or won't he question around John Bolton has been looming for months, right? Yes, Bolton has very clearly been

a key witness who obviously had important information about Trump's conduct with regards to Ukraine. Another witness who was on the National Security Council staff, Fiona Hill, testified that Ambassador Bolton wanted me to go to the lawyers, to John Eisenberg, our senior counsel for the National Security Council, to basically say, you tell Eisenberg, Ambassador Bolton told me, that I am not part of this whatever drug deal that Mulvaney and Sondland are cooking up. And that Bolton referred to Rudy Giuliani as a live grenade who is going to blow everybody up. Yeah. So he was clearly against this. We also heard some testimony from another former National Security Council aide, Tim Morrison, who said that Bolton had met privately with Trump on the issue of Ukraine aid.

So the House asked Bolton to show up for a voluntary deposition, and he refused. There was this court challenge going on regarding another one of his aides who was fighting a subpoena in court. Bolton said he wanted to see how that lawsuit played out before agreeing to testify. But he announced earlier this month that if the Senate subpoenas him, he will testify. He will not fight it in court. And this was a pretty big surprise in Washington and was taken as a suggestion that he very well, which tells his story. And that book now seems to be finished and will be coming out soon. And is leaking out to members of the press.

Yes, so what really changed things was on Sunday night when the New York Times reported on the contents of Bolton's manuscript. And so this is our first account of Bolton's side of the story. And what our reporting showed is that it takes on the central defense of the Trump impeachment. The president's lawyers have repeatedly said that there was no tie between the military aid and the investigations that the president saw. And what he said was that he had a meeting with Trump in August, had something to do with the Russia investigation that bedeviled him for so long. So this is a big deal because no other witness called by Democrats, as Trump's team pointed out, said they heard this from Trump's own mouth directly. And it would take away one of the key elements of Trump's defense.

Which is a defense that his attorneys continue to make in the Senate right now in this trial. Yes, the day after the Bolton news came out, Jay Sekulow went to the floor of the Senate and repeated the assertion that Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection person who we now know seems to be willing to testify the exact opposite. The timing of this manuscript being leaked and even this book being written is kind of incredible, right? Yeah. So Bolton wrote this remarkably quickly. He struck the deal in November. There's been some speculation that he was even writing this book while he was working as national security advisor. In any case, the Bolton PR team quickly responded to the New York Times story by posting the Amazon page for Bolton's book, which they continually mention in statements about it, is called The Room Where It Happened,

a reference to Hamilton, and emphasizing that it will be on sale this March. So, you know, there's been a lot of speculation that all Bolton really cares about is hyping up his book and making a ton of money from it. Shout-outs to The Onion for their headline, Bolton pledges to donate all proceeds from book towards killing Iranians. It's pretty dark. Yeah, sorry. But it was interesting that somehow or other information about this book made its way to the New York Times, just as the Senate is about to

decide on this crucial question of whether to call witnesses for the trial. And the leak makes it indisputably clear that Bolton has very relevant information that would be very important to the case and that it would certainly seem that a body holding a trial over this would want to get his sworn testimony about this. So how is all the Trump machinery responding to this? President Trump himself, his pals over at Fox News who heretofore have loved John Bolton, though. Former Fox News commentator John Bolton. Exactly. So Trump tweeted late Sunday night, I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens. In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book. I believe Lou Dobbs on Fox Business

put up various slides showing Bolton had the same agents for his book as Comey did. So, you know, Bolton, Comey, they're all working together against Trump and trying to smear him in the press and blah, blah, blah. John Bolton himself has been reduced to a tool for the radical Dems in the deep state with his allegation that the president once told him that the aid to the Ukraine was entirely dependent on whether or not Mr. Zelensky carried out investigations of his political opponents. But we've seen in the larger conservative world, we've seen an interesting divide between commentators and outlets who have been calling Bolton a liar, calling him even a warmonger, and then others who, based on their long association with and knowledge of John Bolton, who say that, well, you know, he probably

wouldn't be lying about this. If you want a sense of how big the news is that we've heard in the last 12 hours, 14 hours, just listen to the Trump supporters spitting like crazy that it isn't big news and you get a sense that this is really an important development in this case. Several commentators from National Review spoke out on Monday saying that, you know, they take Bolton's account seriously and they think it's important and they want to hear it. They're not going to accept a dismissal of Bolton as just part of the deep state anti-Trump conspiracy. It's kind of incredible to think that John Bolton could be viewed as a tool for the left considering his history with the left and his disdain for the left.

Well, if you go against the dear leader, you will have to be turned into public enemy number one. So where does this leave the Senate trial? Is Bolton all but sure to show up now with these revelations that contradict so many of the arguments that the president's defense team is making? Well, that is up to the Republican Senate majority. And this question about witnesses, they put it off when the trial began because there was a small but still big enough group of Republican senators who were not prepared to immediately say there should be no witnesses. They wanted to keep the option open as the trial went forward. And before the Bolton news broke, it seemed that they weren't making much progress.

But then Bolton's news changed the dynamics a bit. And there was definitely some chaos behind the scenes in the Senate on Monday. Mitt Romney publicly proclaimed that. I think it's increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton and whether there are other witnesses and documents. Well, that's another matter. But I think John Bolton's relevance to our decision has become increasingly clear. Do you think the matter... Do your colleagues have indicated that to you?

I'm not going to speak for any other Republican senators. But they have. You've had conversations. I have spoken with others who've opined upon this as well. He thinks his case has gotten stronger. He made the case in private to Republican senators at their lunch. He has some names we haven't really heard before in this discussion, like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania brought up the possibility of doing a one-for-one trade where Democrats would get to call one witness and Trump would get to call one witness.

In that case, who would call John Bolton, the Democrats? Yes. Incredible. Yes, I think he very much does want to testify. He could have just kept quiet throughout this whole thing. But in early January, he gave that public statement saying that he would testify if the Senate subpoenaed him. And if the votes do end up being there to call witnesses, I think McConnell would put a lot of pressure on Trump to just rip off the Band-Aid, let Bolton testify. They're nowhere close to the two-thirds vote in the Senate that would be needed

to remove him from office. So what's the worst that could happen? So even if John Bolton rolls into the Senate, let's say, I don't know, next week and says there was a quid pro quo, I was in the room where it happened. You still think President Trump's going to be acquitted? Absolutely. Republicans have made their peace with defending Trump at this point. Trump continues to remain overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. So Republican senators see their future careers and the GOP's performance in 2020 as yoked to Donald Trump, and they're not going to rock that boat. So much for the legitimacy of the trial. Who says it has any legitimacy?

The question was asked by Mr. Sekulow as he opened before this distinguished by. Why? Why? Why are we here? Let me see if I can just posit an answer to that question. We are here, sir, because President Trump pressured a foreign government to target an American citizen for political and personal gain. We are here, sir, because President Trump withheld $391 million in military aid from a vulnerable Ukraine without justification in a manner that has been deemed unlawful. We are here, sir, because President Donald Trump elevated his personal political interests and subordinated the national security interests of the United States of America. We are here, sir, because President Trump corruptly abused his power and then he tried to cover it up. And we are here, sir, to follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution,

and present the truth to the American people. The truth to the American people. That is why we are here, Mr. Seculo. And if you don't know, now you know. Goodbye.