Onetime Trump confidant now a key to impeachment?
A capital mesmerized by a presidency in peril anxiously awaits how John Bolton will side
WASHINGTON — The message that John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, sent supporters of his newly reopened political action committee last week raised as many questions as it answered in a capital consumed by impeachment.
Bolton implicitly criticized Trump’s foreign policy, declaring that “despite all the friendly notes and photo ops, North Korea isn’t our friend and never will be.” But he also wrote that the nation’s security “is under attack from within,” citing “radicalized Democrats.”
The conflicting signals were maddening. After either resigning or being fired by Trump last month, depending on whose version is to be believed, is Bolton so estranged from Trump that he might provide damaging testimony to House investigators? Or does he share the president’s view of out-of-control Democrats pursuing an illegitimate impeachment out of partisan excess?
The question is more than academic. As the House inquiry enters its second month, there may be no one in Washington that investigators want to question more than Bolton. His name has come up repeatedly in testimony that has depicted him resisting Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign and warning that Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
But even as he has been at the center of the discussion during the impeachment inquiry, the outspoken former Fox News commentator has remained uncharacteristically silent. To Democrats who vilified him for years as an ultraconservative warmonger, suddenly Bolton has emerged as a much-sought witness who in the narrative they are assembling may have made a principled stand against Trump’s abuse of power to advance domestic political goals.
“What it says is this is not about competing Republican versus Democratic visions of American foreign policy,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. “This is about whether our foreign policy should be made in the national interest or in the personal political interests of the president.”
It may take longer for investigators to find out. Bolton shares a lawyer with his former deputy and longtime ally, Charles Kupperman, who went to court on Friday to ask a judge to decide whether he should obey a House subpoena or a White House order to not testify. Bolton presumably might follow the same course.
If and when he does testify, Bolton appears positioned to answer fundamental questions surrounding the events that have led the president to the edge of impeachment.
As the national security adviser, Bolton was charged with managing the government’s foreign policy apparatus. Yet Trump and Giuliani worked around Bolton to try to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats. At the same time, the president froze $391 million in American assistance to the former Soviet republic.
“According to the testimony given to Congress so far, Bolton was a central figure in trying to prevent any delay in releasing foreign aid to Ukraine,” said John Yoo, a University of Berkeley law school professor and senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “I cannot see how any responsible investigation would not seek Bolton’s appearance.”
But he added that the White House would presumably “go to the mat” to fight any effort to interview Bolton. “If the White House were to fight the House impeachment on executive privilege grounds, Bolton would be the hill on which to die,” Yoo said. “The Trump White House could claim not just that the impeachment investigation is illegitimate, which is its current line of defense, but that it is defending the right of future presidents to have an effective White House and to conduct a successful foreign policy.”
A Yale-educated lawyer, Bolton brought years of experience when Trump made him his third national security adviser in March 2018. Bolton served in both the Justice Department, where he headed the civil division under President Ronald Reagan, and the State Department, where he was an assistant secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush and an undersecretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations under the second Bush.
While Trump appreciated his firebrand style of politics on Fox News, Bolton saw his job as keeping Trump from making unwise deals with outlier states like North Korea or Iran, leading to friction. Bolton struggled with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for control of foreign policy and left just a day before Trump agreed to restore the frozen aid to Ukraine under pressure from Congress.
The combination of his pedigree and the possibility that he really does have incriminating information about Trump makes him a particularly appealing witness to Democrats. The prospect of one of the nation’s most visible foreign policy conservatives testifying against his former boss would, in their view, underscore the significance of Trump’s transgressions.
But some Democrats warn that they cannot be sure what he will say once he sits for an interview. “You just can’t work from assumptions,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I don’t know what he had. I don’t know if he has value. I don’t know if he is willing to talk about it.”