TRUMP HEADS TOWARD ACQUITTAL Acquittal expected on Wednesday Bolton: Trump told me to help his Ukraine pressure campaign
Despite more revelations from John Bolton, the Senate rejected calling him and others to testify. Some of President Donald Trump’s allies conceded he was guilty of the main charges against him.
WASHINGTON
The Senate brought President Donald Trump to the brink of acquittal on Friday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress, as Republicans voted to block consideration of new witnesses and documents in his impeachment trial and shut down a final push by Democrats to bolster their case for the president’s removal.
In a nearly party-line vote after a bitter debate, Democrats failed to win support from the four Republicans they needed. With Trump’s acquittal virtually certain, the president’s allies rallied to his defense, even as some conceded
WASHINGTON
More than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, President Donald Trump directed John Bolton, then his nationalsecurity adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Bolton.
Trump gave the instruction, Bolton wrote, in early May during an Oval Office conversation that included the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; and the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who is leading the president’s impeachment defense.
Trump told Bolton to call Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who had recently won election as president of Ukraine, to ensure Zelenskiy would meet with Giuliani, who was planning a trip to Ukraine to discuss the investigations that the president sought, in Bolton’s account. Bolton never made the call, he wrote.
The previously undisclosed directive that Bolton describes would be the earliest known instance of Trump seeking to harness the power of the U.S. government to advance his pressure campaign against Ukraine, as he later did on the July call with Zelenskiy. That call triggered a whistleblower complaint and impeachment proceedings. House Democrats have accused him of abusing his authority and are arguing their case before senators in the impeachment trial of Trump, whose lawyers have said he did nothing wrong.
The account in Bolton’s manuscript portrays the most senior White House advisers as early witnesses in the effort that they have sought to distance the president from. And disclosure of the meeting underscores the kind of information that Democrats were looking for in seeking testimony from his top advisers in their impeachment investigation, including Bolton and Mulvaney, only to be blocked by the White House.
In a statement after this article was published,
Trump denied the discussion that Bolton described.
“I never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudy Giuliani, one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, to meet with President Zelenskiy,”
Trump said. “That meeting never happened.”
Giuliani denied that the conversation took place and said those discussions with the president were always kept separate. He was adamant that Cipollone and Mulvaney were never involved in meetings related to Ukraine.
“It is absolutely, categorically untrue,” he said.
Neither Bolton nor a representative for Mulvaney responded to requests for comments.
Bolton described the roughly 10-minute conversation in drafts of his book, which is to go on sale in March. Bolton laid out Trump’s fixation on Ukraine and the president’s belief, based on a mix of scattershot events, assertions, and outright conspiracy theories, that Ukraine tried to undermine his chances of winning the presidency in 2016.
As he began to realize the extent and aims of the pressure campaign, Bolton began to object, he wrote in the book, affirming the testimony of a former National Security Council aide, Fiona Hill, who said Bolton warned that Giuliani was “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
Bolton’s account matches up with a timeline of other developments in the
Ukraine affair. On May 9, The New York Times disclosed that Giuliani was planning to travel to
Ukraine to press for the investigations sought by Trump, saying,”We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do.” The following day, Giuliani sent a letter to Zelenskiy seeking a meeting later in May “with the knowledge and consent” of Trump. Within weeks, with Giuliani’s request to meet with Zelenskiy proving unsuccessful, Trump would empower a group of American diplomats to work with Giuliani to continue pressing Ukraine to agree to his desire for the investigations, according to testimony in the House impeachment inquiry.
Trump also repeatedly made national-security decisions contrary to U.S. interests, Bolton wrote, describing a pervasive sense of alarm among top advisers about the president’s choices. Bolton expressed concern to others in the administration that the president was effectively granting favors to autocratic leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Xi Jinping of China.
The Times reported this week on another revelation from Bolton’s book draft: that Trump told him in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. That account undercuts a key element of the White House impeachment defense — that the aid holdup was separate from his requests for inquiries. Trump has denied the conversation took place.
Since that Times article, people who have reviewed the draft have further described its contents, including details of the May meeting. Bolton’s manuscript was sent to the White House for a standard review process in late December.
Its revelations galvanized the debate over whether to call witnesses in the impeachment trial, but on Friday, Republicans blocked any new testimony at Trump’s trial and moved toward an acquittal in the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history.
The White House has sought to block the release of the book, contending that it contains classified information. The government reviews books by former officials who had access to secrets so they can excise the manuscripts of any classified information. Officials, including Trump, have described Bolton, who was often at odds with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Mulvaney, as a disgruntled former official with an ax to grind.
Bolton has angered Democrats — and some Republicans — for remaining quiet during the House investigation, then announcing that he would comply with any subpoena to testify in the Senate and signaling that he is eager to share his story. Administration officials should “feel they’re able to speak their minds without retribution,” he said at a closed-door lunch in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, NBC affiliate KXAN reported, citing unnamed sources.
“The idea that somehow testifying to what you think is true is destructive to the system of government we have — I think, is very nearly the reverse, the exact reverse of the truth,” Bolton added.