Bolton's Back

Number 24:  Yesterday afternoon’s Kobe Bryant tragedy sucked the air out of the news cycle, displacing the impeachment saga from the airwaves. Or at least it did for a few hours, but then the NY Times released some of the details included in former national security advisor John Bolton’s upcoming book.  Though it had been kept secret, the book, or at least a draft of it, had been shared with appropriate authorities at the White House’s National Security Council for routine review on December 30. Bolton’s lawyer asserts that no one other than the White House and the publishers were privy to its contents.  Of course Trump, his closest advisors, and most likely some, if not all of his impeachment lawyers were aware of what Bolton wrote but the book’s contents are so damning that according to Axios even the White House press shop was kept in in the dark about it, but obviously someone felt it was vital and worth leaking.  As to those damning parts, in addition to putting Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, AG Barr and Secretary of State Pompeo into the Ukraine loop,  Bolton alleges that Trump explicitly told him “he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” Going into the weekend, with Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins expressing faux outrage over some of the things that the Democratic impeachment team had to say about the Republicans fealty to their exalted leader and only Mitt Romney leaning towards supporting the calling of witnesses, it had been looking more and more likely that the Republican controlled Senate was well on its way to rushing the impeachment trial to a quick end, giving Trump the “total” vindication that he claims he deserves.  Now, due to the publication of the Bolton tidbits, all bets are off.  

As to the trial, Trump’s lawyers provided their opening arguments on Saturday.  They kept their presentation short in part because few if any of their targeted viewers were likely to be watching TV on Saturday, arguing that the House impeachment inquiry was nothing more than a partisan ploy that ignored real facts in order to cast Trump’s actions in the worst possible light.  To make their points they peppered their presentation with some of their usual lies, asserting that Republican House members had been kept out of the House SCIF even though they hadn’t been.  Among other things they asserted that despite testimony from Defense Department aide Laura Cooper to the contrary, that there was no quid pro quo because the Ukrainians had no idea that their aid had been withheld.  Basically their argument is that Trump did nothing wrong even if he did do wrong things and that nothing matters because he’s the president and that whole impeachment part of the Constitution is so silly. A group of Republican Senators including James Lankford and Mike Braun were sent out on the Sunday talk shows to push that narrative.  Braun appeared particularly twisted in knots when he had the misfortune of showing up on an evening show right after the Bolton draft segments were released.

Heads on Pikes: As to silly, though Trump’s weekend tweets including one in which he slammed and threatened House Impeachment manager Adam Schiff by tweeting “Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT politician and probably a very sick man.  He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our country” didn’t offend any Republican members of the Senate quite a few, including those snowflakes, Murkowski and Collins, expressed what can only be interpreted as disingenuous outrage over Schiff citing a CBS story that said that key senators had been warned that if they voted against Trump their “head will be on a pike” even though they probably were warned and anyway Schiff explicitly stated that he wasn’t sure if the story was true.  This is the same crew who were “stunned” earlier last week when House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler said that they would be cooperating in a White House cover-up if they didn’t vote for calling witnesses and admitting more testimony.  Speaking of Nadler, over the weekend he tweeted that he won’t be at today’s hearing since he will be accompanying his wife who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to a series of doctor’s appointments.  Virtually every one of his Democratic colleagues tweeted out their thoughts and prayers but if there were any similar concerns from Trump or any of the Republicans I missed them.  Getting back to the “head on pike” threat, whether Trump said it or not, it was certainly the kind of thing he might have said.  Over the weekend, Lev Parnas, who keeps sharing pictures of himself with Trump and other members of the Trump team and family over twitter, released a phone video of a 2018 donor dinner that he attended.  During that dinner  Trump  who was in attendance for well over an hour is heard saying “get rid of her” after being told that former Ambassador to the Ukraine Yovanovitch wasn’t a Trump devotee.  Last night the NY Times reported that the dinner was about as swampy as an event could get, that almost all the attendees spent their paid for time with Trump pitching their business interests.  Curiously, last night Rudy Giuliani, said that he wasn’t at that dinner and that he didn’t even know the Lev/Oleg team at the time it was held.  Circular firing squad time?   

Secretary Pompous:  And then there’s Mike Pompeo.  Maybe it’s because he knew that his name came up in Bolton’s draft, and not in a good way, or maybe it’s because he’s just a horrible person, but for some reason he decided to pick an ugly, pointless fight with a respected NPR reporter.  After the reporter,  Mary Louise Kelly, had the nerve to ask him questions about Ukraine, a subject that she told his aides she would cover, and pushed him about his failure to defend Marie Yovanovitch during an on the record interview that she taped, he ripped into her, asserting the interview was supposed to be off the record, calling her a liar and insisting that no one in America cares about Ukraine and that she was so stupid that she wouldn’t be able to find Ukraine on a map. To prove his point, he pulled out a map with no legends and asked her to prove that she knew where Ukraine was located.  Spoiler alert, she did.  Later he insisted that she had failed his “test” by instead pointing to Bangladesh which was  a needlessly bold faced lie that made him look like even more of a jerk.  Pompeo, the astute diplomat that he isn’t, is supposed to travel to Ukraine this week. He may want to read the op-ed that William Taylor, the former Ukraine acting ambassador wrote for today’s NY Times, it provides a primer on why Ukraine is strategically important.  Trump responded by asking why NPR even exists.

Democrats:  The polls are all over the place but as of now it appears that Bernie Sanders is on the top in Iowa and in New Hampshire even though the cranky fellow has been complaining that it’s not fair that VP Biden gets to campaign while he’s stuck in the Senate hearing room. It’s still not clear how Iowa will turn out as the rules there dictate that anyone supporting a candidate who earns less than the 15%  threshold has to shift their support to their second choice. Elizabeth Warren who is now polling fourth in Iowa  received an endorsement from the influential Des Moines Register over the weekend.  Mike Bloomberg, who continues to climb slowly in the national polls has no presence in Iowa but has been busy in Florida where he’s been out and about physically and on twitter bragging about his support for Israel to voters who would probably be happy to vote for him over Trump were he the Democratic candidate.  That’s got to be getting under Trump’s skin bigly. As to Israel, Trump has both Bibi Netanyahu and his opponent the reluctant Benny Gantz coming to the White House this week where he plans to announce the details of his long awaited peace plan, the one that the Palestinians want nothing to do with.