House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told MSNBC that former National Security Adviser John Bolton refused to submit a sworn affidavit on President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine after the Senate rejected additional witnesses and documents.
Said Schiff: “So for whatever reason, he apparently was willing to testify before the Senate but apart from that, seems intent on saving it for his book. He’ll have to answer for that.”
President Trump asked in a midnight tweet why his former national security adviser, John Bolton, did not “complain” earlier about Trump’s actions with Ukraine.
Trump continued his rant this morning: “For a guy who couldn’t get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn’t get approved for anything since, ‘begged’ me for a non Senate approved job, which I gave him despite many saying ‘Don’t do it, sir,’ takes the job, mistakenly says ‘Libyan Model’ on T.V., and many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?”
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President Trump expressed concern with having former National Security Adviser John Bolton testify at the Senate impeachment trial, CBS News reports.
Said Trump: “The problem with John is that it’s a national security problem… He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it’s not very positive and I have to deal on behalf of the country?”
But Trump also noted Bolton did not leave the White House on the best of terms: “You don’t like people testifying when they didn’t leave on good terms.”
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff told CNN that his committee has no plans to hear testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton before President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, arguing there’s “little to be gained” by going that route at this moment.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN that “of course” he would like to hear from former National Security Adviser John Bolton during the upcoming impeachment trial.
Said Romeny: “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
However, when asked if he would vote to subpoena Bolton, Romney stopped short and said he first would want to know what the process is.
“John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Trump who resisted efforts to pressure Ukraine for help against domestic political rivals, dashed any expectation on Tuesday that he would testify soon in the House impeachment investigation in response to a court ruling involving a onetime colleague,” the New York Times reports.
“Charles Cooper, a lawyer who represents Mr. Bolton, said that a court decision on Monday ordering another former White House official to appear before Congress under subpoena did not apply to Mr. Bolton because of the nature of his job. Mr. Cooper said Mr. Bolton would therefore wait for another judge to rule in a separate case that could take weeks more to litigate.”
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton posted a cryptic message:
“Glad to be back on Twitter after more than two months. For the backstory, stay tuned… We have now liberated the Twitter account, previously suppressed unfairly in the aftermath of my resignation as National Security Advisor. More to come…”
Lawyers for former national security advisor John Bolton have been in touch with officials working on the House committees conducting an impeachment probe into President Trump, NBC News reports.
“The news comes more than a week after the White House’s former top Europe expert, Fiona Hill, testified to Congress that Bolton has been so disturbed by efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponents that he called it a ‘drug deal.'”
When the White House was asked about Bolton by CNBC, an official said: “We’re not going to talk about Bolton.”
Daily Beast: “In the course of casual conversations with advisers and friends, President Trump has privately raised suspicions that a spiteful John Bolton, his notoriously hawkish former national security adviser, could be one of the sources behind the flood of leaks against him… At one point, Trump guessed that Bolton was behind one of the anonymous accounts that listed the former national security adviser as one of the top officials most disturbed by the Ukraine-related efforts of Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who remains at the center of activities that spurred the impeachment inquiry.”
“The former national security adviser—who departed the administration last month on awful, mutually bitter terms—is working on a book about his time serving Trump, and has ‘a lot to dish,’ one knowledgeable source noted. “
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton was at odds with President Trump over his July phone call with the president of Ukraine, NBC News reports.
“Three officials said Bolton argued against Trump calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on July 25 because he was concerned the president wasn’t coordinating with advisers on what to say and might air personal grievances.”
John Bolton harshly criticized President Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda, Politico reports.
Bolton also said that any negotiations with North Korea and Iran were “doomed to failure,” according to two attendees.
Susan Glasser: “The spectacle of the Trump Presidency often overwhelms our ability to process the stakes of any individual episode. But the firing of John Bolton was not just another Washington farce in what the President himself has now started calling, as he did the other day, on Twitter, ‘the Age of Trump.’ Bolton’s exit serves as a reminder that the intensive national-security decision-making process of previous Presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, has been abandoned by Trump, subverted to the Presidential ego, and will not return for the duration of his tenure.”
“It’s worth remembering that, as all this played out inside the White House, the Taliban almost showed up at Camp David, in time to mark the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11. Bolton, who evidently made his vocal opposition to the idea known to the media in a way that likely hastened his firing, didn’t stop Trump from hosting them. Nor, for that matter, did Pompeo, whose State Department team has been overseeing the talks. In the end, it was only the Taliban’s decision to continue killing American soldiers while simultaneously negotiating with the United States that provided the pretext for Trump to put a stop to his own hastily conceived idea. Trump will now become the only President ever to have had four national-security advisers in three years, but he might as well consider not having one at all.”
CNN: Trump makes clear he’s calling the foreign policy shots post Bolton.
“As President Trump began losing confidence in national security adviser John Bolton, whom he fired on Tuesday, he reached out to the man he had fired to give Bolton the job: retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster,” NBC News reports.
“Trump’s contacts with McMaster perhaps presaged his decision Tuesday to unceremoniously fire Bolton. They also marked a significant a remarkable shift for the president that is emblematic of how much Bolton fell out of favor since Trump welcomed him into the White House 17 months ago. At that time, Trump was barely speaking to McMaster and regularly did derogatory impressions of him in his absence.”
Aaron Blake: “Just an hour before the announcement, the White House announced that Bolton would be appearing at a 1:30 p.m. Eastern time news conference alongside Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It seems unlikely Bolton would agree to show up after effectively being fired. If Bolton was on his way out as of Monday night, why did the White House press office not seem to know about it at 11 a.m. Tuesday morning?”
“Adding to the subplot is Bolton’s own comments. His tweets Monday night and Tuesday didn’t indicate anything had changed, and shortly after Trump’s tweets, he chimed in by saying, ‘I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’”
Josh Marshall: “Looking at the escalating (US-created) crisis with Iran, one thing I realize is that a lot of people do not quite know who John Bolton is. They assume – rightly – that anyone in the Trump orbit must be either a moral weakling, a crazy person or someone with one foot out the door. All true. But John Bolton is a unique and uniquely dangerous character.”
“Bolton is a caricature of a militarist and warmonger. He is sometimes classed with the so-called ‘neo-conservatives’ who played the central role getting the country into the Iraq War. This isn’t really correct, either in classification or historical terms. For all their shortcomings many of the leading neoconservative policy hands and intellectuals were big on democracy promotion – often in foolish ways, usually only when it was convenient and mainly in Europe. But this is at least part of the worldview.”
“Bolton doesn’t come from that worldview, as limited and as disastrous as it has proven. In really every context he is for hard US dominance, unilateralism and war as the preferred course of action. Again, he’s really the caricature of a militarist, the kind of one-dimensional, clownishly hawkish type who gets described in small circulation left-wing magazines but can’t possibly exist in real life, only he does exist and his name is John Bolton.”
“White House National Security Adviser John Bolton is expanding his influence in increasingly visible ways, pursuing his own longstanding foreign policy priorities at the risk of tensions with top administration officials — and even Donald Trump himself,” Bloomberg reports.
“Since joining Trump’s White House, Bolton has pursued an agenda that includes trying to break Iran financially, oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, shield Americans from the reach of the International Criminal Court and toughen the U.S. posture toward Russia. He coordinated with key lawmakers, U.S. diplomatic and defense officials and the Israelis to compel Trump to slow an abrupt withdrawal of American forces from Syria.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “Just how weak a president has Donald Trump become? For an illustration, see a terrific Washington Post article on the foreign-policy decision-making process since John Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser. Or, rather, the absence of anything resembling a process…”
“When a weak president – or, as with Reagan, a president with significant flaws – doesn’t have a James Baker around, the administration can turn into a free-for-all, with White House staffers and executive-branch personnel pursuing their own preferences, protecting their turf, and generally disrupting the policy process. That seems to be what happened to George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War; whatever his own views, he was ill-served by everyone, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, who failed to present him with honest options and instead used bureaucratic skills to lock in the choices they wanted. Similarly, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both suffered from foreign-policy inexperience, especially early in their presidencies, and made mistakes as a result.”
“For Trump, the problem is worse. Even if he wanted to replace Bolton, there’s only a tiny pool of people who are both qualified for the job and willing to work in this White House. Which is yet another consequence of presidential weakness: He can’t persuade many people to work for him. And if Trump is getting rolled in an area where presidents have unusually strong authority – in their capacity as commanders-in-chief – imagine how he’s faring in other policy areas.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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