It was entirely predictable that the President Trump impeachment trial would feature a January surprise, and now it has arrived. It came in the form of a New York Times report that former national security adviser John Bolton, in a new book, writes that the president told him that he “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.”
The words are from the New York Times, not Bolton. Neither the report nor any other has quoted even a word from the Bolton book.
The news jolted the impeachment trial on the second day of the Trump defense, and it gave rise to a dizzying number of questions and scenarios.
The most obvious question is what effect the Bolton book will have on the Democratic push to have Bolton testify in the Senate trial. Democrats asked Bolton to testify before the House Intelligence Committee last October but did not subpoena him or make any effort to compel his testimony. They even withdrew a subpoena for one of Bolton’s deputies, claiming that the legal process to enforce a subpoena would take too long.
The Bolton news made it all the more mystifying why the House did not pursue Bolton’s testimony. More than three months have passed since it could have issued such a subpoena. The process might be nearly over at this point, with a decision expected soon. And the president would have been given a chance to defend the confidentiality of his relationship with his closest advisers. But the House chose not to act, leaving the issue to Senate Democrats.
The Bolton affair unfolded in a fast-moving series of events:
- The Trump team began its legal defense in the Senate on Saturday, basing its arguments on six points about the Trump-Zelensky call and related matters. The fourth point was that no witness testified that Trump himself said “that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting, or anything else.”
- The next day, Sunday, the New York Times reported that Trump told Bolton that he wanted to continue the pause in Ukrainian security assistance until Ukraine helped with the investigations Trump wanted. That is, if the paper’s report was accurate, Bolton’s book would blow the defense’s fourth point out of the water.
- Beginning Sunday night, Democrats intensified their demand that Bolton be called as a witness.
- An Amazon page for Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, went live. (The book’s title is apparently taken from a song about a dark political dealing, The Room Where It Happens, in the musical Hamilton.)
- Bolton’s representative and allies tried to distance themselves from the leak.
- Trump tweeted, “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.”
On the first and most important issue, there is no way to assess what Bolton has written because no one in the public, and that appears to include the news organizations that broke the Bolton story, has read what Bolton has written. What, precisely, did Bolton say, and in what words did he say it? The public is entirely in the dark.
Bolton’s lawyer, Washington veteran attorney Chuck Cooper, suggested that Bolton had done everything according to the rules. Cooper said that, on Dec. 30, he sent a copy of the Bolton book to the White House National Security Council for the sole purpose of having it reviewed for possible classified information. Cooper said he had a “firm belief” that the manuscript contained no classified information but sent it to the NSC out of an abundance of caution and also to comply with a nondisclosure agreement Bolton signed when he joined the Trump White House in 2018. Cooper said the Bolton side had behaved properly, but something must have gone awry at the NSC.
“It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today, that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted,” Cooper said in a statement, “and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript.”
On the other hand, the New York Times reported that Bolton did more than his lawyer suggested. “Mr. Bolton’s explosive account … was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates,” the paper reported. If that is accurate, the Bolton book, or at least a critical part of it, could be all over Washington and beyond. If Bolton sent the book to “close associates,” he blew through the confidentiality a president should have with his closest advisers. Of course, if he included such information in a book he hoped to sell to thousands and thousands of customers, well, he really blew through it.
Bolton’s side quickly pushed back. His longtime spokeswoman, Sarah Tinsley, told Axios: “[Bolton’s] manuscript was transmitted to the White House for pre-publication review by the NSC,” she said. “The ambassador has not passed the draft manuscript to anyone else. Period. It was sent over there, to the NSC, several weeks ago.”
It was a statement one could read in a nonskeptical way: Neither Bolton nor anyone on his behalf sent the manuscript anywhere, or skeptically: Perhaps Bolton himself didn’t send it, but someone acting on his behalf did. One of the darkly amusing things about the whole contretemps was that it involved a bunch of highly skilled lawyers making claims in very, very careful language, so careful that it can be difficult to tell precisely what they are saying. “Because everybody is so sophisticated, it’s hard to take any of it at face value,” said one lawyer who follows the matter closely.
In any event, team Bolton rejected responsibility for the leak.
Remember, meanwhile, that the public, and that includes the senators hearing the impeachment trial, does not know what Bolton actually wrote. On Monday afternoon, Maggie Haberman, one of the reporters who broke the story for the New York Times, tweeted that Bolton “was not always seen as a reliable narrator by [White House] colleagues.” Haberman further characterized the Bolton matter as a “he said, he said” dispute. Whatever the tweet was intended to mean, it did not clarify the situation.
As all that was happening, there was the ongoing question: Did the Trump defense team know what was in Bolton’s book? After all, Cooper sent a copy of it to the National Security Council on Dec. 30. Surely in those last four weeks, the defense lawyers would somehow have had a look at it and could prepare to deal with it in their defense, right? Apparently not. On Monday, several sources in and out of the White House said that the book was held closely inside the NSC and that no one else in the White House saw it.
In other words, when the defense lawyers went before the Senate on Saturday and confidently declared that no witness had testified that the president himself ever said there was a connection between investigations, a presidential meeting, and Ukrainian security assistance, they had no idea the Bolton book was just around the corner. So, in a little more than 24 hours, one of their key points blew up in their faces. Of course, that would be true only if the New York Times story accurately portrayed the full meaning and context of what Bolton wrote.
Then there was what was happening on Capitol Hill. One Republican senator said GOP colleagues were unhappy that Bolton had put them in a spot. They had been arguing against calling witnesses to the trial, and then it was revealed that Bolton had already put his account of events on paper. It already exists, right now. It may be spread all over Washington. The cat, in other words, was a long way out of the bag, and now Senate Republicans would have to figure out a way to deal with it.
The usual suspects among wavering Republicans such as Romney, Collins, and Murkowski hinted that they were even more inclined to accept witnesses post-Bolton. And, of course, if Bolton were called to testify, senators would have to have his book, too, to measure his testimony by his written account. One solution, perhaps the only solution, to the problem would be for Bolton to release it all now.
But that argument served to highlight Bolton’s financial consideration in the matter. He has a book contract with Simon & Schuster. Both he and the publisher want to sell books. The publication date is March 17. Giving away the whole story for the impeachment trial is probably not a great sales technique, but impeachment is a far more important issue than Bolton’s and Simon & Schuster’s financial considerations.
When 1 p.m. arrived in the Senate, everyone wanted to know how the Trump legal team would deal with the Bolton news. Would they lead with it? Would they tear up the plan and focus on it? Would they ignore it?
The answer was they would ignore it. At the very beginning of the presentation, defense lawyer Jay Sekulow seemed to be referring, somewhat obliquely, to the controversy when he said, “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 then he moved on to making Trump’s case.
In other words: You want us to devote our presentation to a newspaper account that quotes not one word of a book that no one can judge? No way.
Instead, the defense team went ahead with its carefully laid plan for Monday. Part of it was a recreating its strong performance on Saturday. Part was celebrity appearances by Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz. The plan did not include Bolton.
But, offstage, the Bolton argument was raging. Everyone was arguing in the dark, of course. That will not change until the public sees what Bolton wrote.
