Dems hoping Bolton will ruin Trump. Good luck with that
WASHINGTON >> Consider the irony: Senate Democrats are hoping that former national security adviser John Bolton —
yes, John Bolton — will provide them with the bombshell testimony that brings down President Trump. In other words, they have pinned their hopes on a man they have vilified for years, and whose national security career they sought to destroy. Good luck with that.
Democrats want Bolton to take the stand in Trump’s impeachment trial because during the House inquiry National Security Council official Fiona Hill testified that Bolton was “furious” when he learned about a shadow operation in Ukraine, headed by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that involved temporarily withholding U.S. military aid and pressing the government to investigate the business dealings of former vice president
Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Hill said Bolton described Giuliani as a “hand grenade,” told her to bring her concerns about the matter to White House lawyers and declared that he didn’t want any part of “whatever drug deal” was afoot in Ukraine.
No doubt that is all true. Bolton is a foreign policy professional. But none of this means that Bolton believes Trump committed an impeachable offense. He may very well believe Trump’s decision to withhold lethal aide to Ukraine, and to raise Hunter Biden with
Ukraine’s president, was wrong. (If so, he’d be correct). But not every bad decision a president makes is impeachable. I’ll bet Bolton considers President Barack Obama’s decision to release five senior Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for U.S. Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl — an act that the Government Accountability Office found was illegal — worse than a “drug deal.” Yet no Democrats called for Obama’s impeachment over it.
Some have speculated that Bolton may be motivated to testify against Trump because of his acrimonious exit from the White House and his disagreement with some of Trump’s foreign policy decisions. Please. Whatever he thinks of the way Trump treated him, Bolton has been treated far worse by Democrats.
Have they forgotten how they tried to ruin his professional reputation and filibustered his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, forcing President George W. Bush to install him in the post temporarily with a recess appointment? Or how, when Trump appointed Bolton as national security adviser, Democrats excoriated Bolton for being, as Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., called him, “a grave danger to the American people”?
But if Bolton’s testimony were so critical to their case, House Democrats should have subpoenaed him to testify in their impeachment inquiry and then allowed the courts to adjudicate Trump’s invocation of executive privilege. Instead, they artificially rushed their half-baked impeachment inquiry to close it out before Christmas and then charged Trump with obstruction of Congress for appealing to the third equal branch of government — the judiciary — as is his constitutional right. In so doing, Democrats forfeited the high ground. If their case is deficient, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Regardless of whether and how Bolton testifies, Trump is going to be acquitted. The fact that Democrats are counting on Bolton to be the hero who rescues the doomed efforts by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to end Trump’s presidency shows how weak their case really is.