Horowitz: Bolton Landmine Detonates

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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

It was always a matter of when--not if--the first-hand knowledge John Bolton has of President Trump’s actions and motivations on Ukraine would become publicly known. "When" arrived over the weekend in the form of leaks to The New York Times of the unpublished manuscript of Bolton’s book, scheduled for release in mid-March.   

The revelations in the former national security adviser’s book are as explosive as expected by anyone who has been closely following both the testimony of Bolton’s aides in front of the House Intelligence Committee and the fact pattern clearly established by the House impeachment trial managers.  Bolton asserts that President 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 the Bidens,” as the New York Times reported.

Among the other juicy nuggets in the book are that  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conceded to Bolton that the attacks by Rudy Giuliani on then Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch were unfounded and may have been motivated by the former New York City mayor’s business interests.  Bolton also asserts that he warned Attorney General William Barr about Giuliani’s moves in Ukraine and their influence on the president.

Bolton’s first-hand revelations blow a big hole in the case that the president’s lawyers began to make on Saturday in the Senate, in which in the face of what already was a mountain of evidence, they argued that the president’s withholding of needed defense assistance to Ukraine was separate from his interest in the investigations.  Given that the White House has known what was in Bolton’s book for at least a couple of weeks because he submitted it for security clearances, Trump’s attorneys’ insistence on this point is more than a bit puzzling. On the other hand, it fits with the president’s faith, that aided by his enablers on Fox News and in other corners of the right-wing media echo chamber, he can create an alternative reality that is sufficiently persuasive to his base to keep Republican Senators from straying too far from the White House talking points. The immediate impact of the Bolton revelations will be to up the odds of securing the 4 Republican votes needed to get to the 51-vote majority required to call witnesses.  Now that any doubt has been removed that Bolton has highly relevant information to share and that he has already declared that he is willing to testify, if subpoenaed, rejecting his offer to testify becomes harder to resist.  The momentum for a blanket turning away of any witnesses is dissipating.

These revelations and any subsequent testimony they generate, however, will nearly certainly not change the ultimate outcome where there still may not be one Republican vote to remove the president from office when at least 20 are needed.  And you are already getting the predictable attacks on Bolton from the president and his enablers, claiming that he is making this up to generate book sales.

But for most Americans and I suspect even a good percentage of Republicans, Bolton will weather these attacks with his credibility intact.  The resulting salutary long-term impact of these revelations will be to get more Republican Senators to make the best argument available to them; namely, that what President Trump did was wrong, but is not a sufficient reason to remove him from office especially with an election less than a year away.

Achieving a consensus from the body politic that withholding congressionally approved military aid from an ally facing our adversary Russia in order to leverage an investigation into a political opponent is wrong and should never be done again may seem to some like “small potatoes.” Still, with apologies to William Butler Yeats, it would demonstrate that “the centre can hold.”  It would be a victory for standing up for our values--and for reasserting Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous words--foundational to any true democratic discourse: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

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