Boltons Memoir Undercuts Hype as Impeachments Would-Be Star Witness
June 24, 2020
Aaron Maté reports on John Boltons controversial new book and finds that
Bolton would have had little evidence to present had he testified at Trumps
impeachment hearing.
By Aaron Maté
Real Clear Investigations
In late January, John Bolton became the latest and unlikeliest official
to enjoy a moment of Resistance glory. A New York Times report about
Boltons forthcoming memoir fueled round-the-clock expectations that the
former national security adviser would substantiate the core allegation at
the heart of President Trumps then-ongoing Senate impeachment trial that
the president tried to coerce Ukraine into opening an investigation of Joe
and Hunter Biden in a quid pro quo for military aid. Compelling his
testimony was cast as a matter of national urgency. Bolton was never given
the chance as Senate Republicans voted to block witnesses and acquit Trump
on both impeachment counts.
In the publicity blitz for his new memoir, The Room Where It Happened,
Bolton has tried to keep the initial narrative alive. Speaking to ABC News,
he claimed that Trump, at a meeting in August 2019, said he wanted a probe
of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance. That
conversation, Bolton added, was the crispest indication of the linkage.
The specificity of the linkage, I think, was unmistakable.
His memoir, however, fails to substantiate that allegation.
In fact, Bolton offers new evidence that undermines it.
What he told Martha Raddatz is not what he writes in his book. Instead of a
sharp demand of a quid pro quo, Bolton writes, Trump said he wasnt in
favor of sending [Ukraine] anything until all the Russia-investigation
materials related to [Hillary] Clinton and Biden had been turned over.
Bolton does not explain what he means by materials and no interviewer
has asked him to so far. RealClearInvestigations request to Bolton for
comment, sent through a representative, was not immediately answered.
No Word on Burisma
Regardless, those were not at the heart of Trumps impeachment. Trump was
not impeached for trying to coerce Ukraine into handing over
Russia-investigation materials to the U.S., but for allegedly trying to
force Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a wholly separate
investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company where Hunter was
given a lucrative board seat while his father was running U.S. policy in
Ukraine.
Yet Burisma is not even mentioned in Boltons book and Hunter only in
passing. This includes an acknowledgement that Bolton does not even remember
if the younger Biden was actually discussed. At a May 8 meeting where Trump
and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani discuss the latters desire to meet
with President-Elect Zelensky, Bolton cannot recall if the purpose is to
discuss [Ukraines] investigation of either Hillary Clintons efforts to
influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and
the 2020 election, or maybe both.
Son gets job on energy company board after his fathers government backs
violent coup.
Bolton says his recollections are not precise because the Ukraine-related
theories floating around the Trump administration always seemed
intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed. Even
after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the
multiple conspiracy theories at work.
Boltons words are also ambiguous. The fact that Trump allegedly said he
wasnt in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything is not an explicit linkage to
military aid. And as for the Russian-investigation materials, Bolton does
not specify what Trump was referring to. It seems likely Trump may have been
referencing his reported theory that the Democratic National Committee
server was somehow hacked with Ukrainian involvement.
Trump may also have been seeking information on the Ukrainians who openly
admitted to interfering in the 2016 campaign with the aim of thwarting his
candidacy, most notably by leaking allegations of illegal payments to Paul
Manafort. It is highly plausible that these were Trumps priorities. In his
July 25 phone call with Zelensky, which sparked the whistleblower complaint
behind Ukrainegate, Trumps top issue and the object of the favor he
requested was not the Bidens, but securing Zelenskys assistance with the
Justice Departments ongoing review of how the Russia investigation began in
2016.
Whatever the case, for Bolton to write that Trump drew a link between these
issues and the security aid and not a link to a demand that Ukraine open
an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma contradicts the impeachment
case that many expected him to validate.
Bolton, perhaps inadvertently, also lends credence to the Trump
administrations public defense of its freeze on security assistance to
Ukraine, which Democrats cast as the linchpin of a politically motivated
quid pro quo. In his July 25 call with Zelensky and subsequent public
statements, Trump has said that he wanted NATO allies to spend more on
Ukrainian military funding. Bolton recounts that on Aug. 30 just days
after an article in Politico made the aid freeze public, including to the
Ukrainian government Trump repeated his complaints about the U.S. burden,
and proposed that NATO provide Ukraine with the security assistance instead
of Washington:
Trump said, I dont give a shit about NATO. I am ready to say, If you
dont pay, we wont defend them. I want the three hundred million dollars
[he meant two hundred fifty million dollars, one piece of the assistance
earmarked for Ukraine] to be paid through NATO.
He then said to Pence,
Call [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg and have him have NATO pay.
Say The President is for you, but the money should come from NATO, which
still didnt make any sense.
If Trump is freezing the military aid for the sole purpose of coercing a
Ukrainian investigation, it would be incongruous for him to propose an
outcome that delivers the money without the investigation he is supposedly
trying to compel.
As a part of their impeachment case, Democrats argued that Trump released
the aid to Ukraine only after getting caught through publicity surrounding
the whistleblower complaint. Yet Bolton writes that after Ukraine conducted
a successful prisoner swap with Russia on Sept. 7, Trump had seemingly
indicated that the swap might be enough to get him to release the security
assistance. The money was released four days later, on Sept. 11.
Says He Wanted Nothing to do With Ukraine
Bolton confirms national security aide Fiona Hills testimony that he told
her he did not want to be part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [White
House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up. But he offers context
that makes that line far less explosive than it was initially received.
Bolton was not referring to leveraging any military aid, but to Sondlands
attempt to push for a hasty meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White
House, where the Giuliani issues could be discussed before Ukraines
parliamentary elections in July.
Bolton says he nixed the idea of a meeting because Trump had recently told
him that he didnt want to have anything to do with Ukrainians of any
stripe, due to Ukrainian meddling against him in the 2016 campaign.
Sondland, in Boltons view, was freelancing. According to Bolton, Trump
had also resolved the visit issue just before leaving for the United
Kingdom in June, by saying he would meet with Zelensky not until the fall,
the right outcome in my view.
John Bolton adjusting eyeglasses
John Bolton, 2017, at Conservative Political Action Conference, in National
Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore on Flickr)
It is easy to forget why Bolton was initially cast as a savior figure in
January by those hoping to remove Trump by impeachment. When news of his
memoir emerged, 10 days after the Senate trial began, Democrats had failed
to prove their case. Not a single witness in the House impeachment hearings
had provided direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The only witness who even
spoke to Trump about the Ukraine aid was the then-European Union Ambassador
Gordon Sondland. He reiterated multiple times that nobody told me directly
that the aid was tied to anything, and that such a linkage was only his
presumption and personal, you know, guess.
Sondlands testimony was even more damaging to the impeachment case because,
according to the impeachment narrative, he was the Trump official who
purportedly relayed the alleged quid pro quo to the Ukrainian side. But
Sondland revealed that he had only told Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, in a
very, very brief pull-aside conversation, that I didnt know exactly why
the aid has been frozen, but that a demand to open investigations could be
a reason.
For his part, Yermak has said he does not even remember discussing the
frozen aid with Sondland. That highlighted another problem with the
Democrats quid pro quo allegation: Not a single Ukrainian official
substantiates it. In addition to Yermak, President Zelensky and Foreign
Minister Vadym Prystaiko also said that they saw no tie between the frozen
military funding and pressure to open investigations. Even Democratic Sen.
Chris Murphy, a staunch impeachment advocate, corroborates them: When they
met in early September, Murphy recalled, Zelensky did not make any
connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he
was getting from Giuliani.
The Ukrainians claims make sense in light of the fact that they only
learned of the aid freeze, along with the rest of the world, with the
Politico article published August 28. That would have meant that the
supposed quid pro quo demand was made to them only after the issue became a
matter of public controversy. That scenario was always implausible on its
face. And now Boltons memoir has failed to change the picture. Bolton seems
to grasp this fact. I think the House Democrats built a cliff, they threw
themselves off of it, he told Raddatz of ABC News. And halfway down, they
looked up and saw me, and said, Hey, why dont you come along?
