How Republicans responded to the question on everyone's mind.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. The possibility of testimony from John Bolton loomed over Day 2 of the White House legal team’s opening arguments. |
- Monday was memorable: A long list of conservative lawyers, including Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz, took to the Senate floor to argue on behalf of President Trump, while the news of John Bolton’s book manuscript scrambled the calculations that Senate Republicans were making about hearing new witnesses.
- The presentation from the Trump team barely acknowledged the new political reality that the Bolton news delivered. “We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information,” Jay Sekulow, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, said. “We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all.” Mr. Dershowitz said that what Mr. Bolton alleged wasn’t an impeachable offense.
- Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Bolton, his former national security adviser, denying he had admitted the quid pro quo, saying that Mr. Bolton had never complained to him about it, and suggesting that he was only trying to sell books. He also said that Mr. Bolton had not testified because House Democrats failed to ask him — which, as CNN’s Manu Raju pointed out, was not true.
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The Trump team’s defensive line |
In presentations that spanned more than eight hours, the White House lawyers spent little time defending Mr. Trump’s actions. Instead, several gave speeches arguing that Democrats were misinterpreting and wrongly applying the standards for impeachment. Here’s some of what they said. |
Mr. Sekulow played a video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi handing out special pens at an impeachment article signing ceremony and said that Democrats were treating what should be a somber set of procedures with a kind of cheer. |
Mr. Starr, the former independent counsel who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton’s impeachment, cast himself as an impeachment skeptic. He urged the Senate to “restore our constitutional and historical traditions” when impeachment was rare. “Like war, impeachment is hell,” he said. “Or at least presidential impeachment is hell.” |
Michael Purpura, the deputy White House counsel, said Democrats were wrong that Ukraine’s president had never received his White House meeting with Mr. Trump, pointing out that the two leaders met Sept. 25 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York. |
Jane Raskin, a lawyer who defended Mr. Trump in the Mueller investigation, argued that Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was well intentioned in trying to investigate corruption in Ukraine, and that his outspoken public image was a sign of being a good lawyer. But, she said, Mr. Giuliani was merely a minor figure, “that shiny object meant to distract you.” |
Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, discussed what she believed were corrupt conflicts of interest in Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company during his father’s time as vice president. |
Eric Herschmann, a private lawyer, argued that it was in fact President Barack Obama who should have been impeached for the same abuse of power charges leveled against Mr. Trump. |
Patrick Philbin, a deputy counsel to the president, argued that Democrats did not have the constitutional authority to start the impeachment inquiry and that their subpoenas were invalid. Ms. Pelosi, he said, had the House proceed on little more than a news conference. |
Robert Ray, who succeeded Mr. Starr as the independent counsel investigating Mr. Clinton, said that House managers were drawing on “their own interpretations” about Mr. Trump’s motivations, and that impeachable conduct must be so serious that it subverted the nation’s system of government — a bar, he said, that Mr. Trump’s actions did not clear. |
Mr. Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer, said the founders meant for impeachment to be used for explicitly criminal acts such as treason or bribery, not what he called “vague” and “noncriminal” charges like abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. |
When Republican senators returned to the Capitol this morning after just a day away, they were immediately met with questions about what Mr. Bolton’s claims would mean for the trial. |
Categories of responses quickly formed: Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins reiterated their interest in hearing from Mr. Bolton. Senators Lamar Alexander and Lisa Murkowski, seen as possibly open to hearing from witnesses, said they would wait to decide until later this week. Ms. Murkowski said she was “curious” about what Mr. Bolton would say. |
Mr. Trump’s most strident supporters in the Senate were quick to create a pretext of suspicion around the Bolton news. “I think there’s going to be something new coming out every day, very similar to what we saw in the Kavanaugh trial,” Senator John Barrasso said. “New information, old information told in a different way to inflame emotions.” |
And several senators appeared to indicate that Mr. Bolton would be allowed to testify only if the Senate also called witnesses that Republicans wanted to hear from. “I promise you this: If we add to the record, we’re going to call Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and all these other people,” Senator Lindsey Graham said. |
I checked in with my colleagues Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nick Fandos, who were both in the Capitol today, about what it felt like as the Bolton news rippled through the Senate. |
INSIDE THE MANSFIELD ROOM, ACROSS FROM THE SENATE CHAMBER |
Nick, take me into this wood-paneled room where Senate Republicans had their daily lunch meeting today. What happened? |
Mitch McConnell came in and addressed the group by saying: Everyone take a deep breath. We’re not going to be voting on this until Friday. We’ll have a chance to ask questions. Nobody needs to lock themselves into a position just now. |
Different senators stood and spoke — Mitt Romney was the most forceful advocate in the room, unsurprisingly, for calling witnesses. He tried to make the case for why they ought to do that. |
Pat Toomey, whose name hasn’t been thrown around as much — he’s a business-minded Republican from Pennsylvania who hasn’t been particularly outspoken — suggested that if the Senate were going to head down the witness path, he’d be open to a one-for-one deal: one witness who could shed light on the managers’ case, and one witness friendlier to the president’s case. That idea has picked up a little more interest among Republicans. |
How much did the Bolton news change the witness discussion? |
They were already ready to have this conversation. So today they were trying to figure out what had and hadn’t changed. It will be Thursday or Friday until this gets sorted out. Mr. McConnell has every reason to play for time. Maybe some of the shininess of the Bolton story wears off, and senators will remember what Mr. McConnell has said throughout, which is that witnesses will prolong the trial but won’t change the outcome. |
IN THE HALLWAYS OF THE CAPITOL |
Sheryl, you spent the morning in the hallways as senators were asked about Mr. Bolton. What did you see? |
Reporters were even more eager than usual to chase down the four senators who have been most open to witnesses to see if the story had changed any minds. It’s unclear that it did. But the news certainly rattled people here. It’s shaken the trial more than anything else since the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump on Dec. 18. |
Did you get the sense that senators who were against hearing witnesses were suddenly conflicted? |
Something really interesting happened this morning: Three Senate Republicans — Lindsey Graham, James Lankford and Mike Lee — were scheduled to attend a Republican news conference but didn’t show. Mr. Graham’s absence was notable. He later talked to reporters and said, somewhat flippantly, that he didn’t know whom to trust anymore. His absence suggested to me that these revelations about Mr. Bolton really upended things for him. |
How influential can this news be in a space of just a few days, before the Senate considers witnesses? |
No matter how much new damning evidence comes out in real time, Republicans say the same thing, which is that the House didn’t collect this evidence; it’s a shoddy case; the Democrats haven’t proved it; it’s not our job to do their investigating for them. A number of them were dismissive of the new report. They tried to frame it as selective leaking. Some of them turned on Mr. Bolton, suggesting that he was trying to sell books, and that this was a last-minute maneuver. |
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What else we’re following |
- Tonight my colleagues reported a new revelation from Mr. Bolton’s book: He had concerns that Mr. Trump was effectively granting personal favors to autocrats in federal investigations, which Mr. Bolton said he had revealed privately to Attorney General William Barr last year.
- How many Republican votes are needed to subpoena Mr. Bolton? The rules for how a witness might be subpoenaed are murky, with gaps in the written procedures and only a few precedents.
- In our Opinion pages, two Georgetown law professors and a former Republican congressman argue that the rules of impeachment allow for the chief justice to issue his own subpoenas — a possible, if unlikely, loophole around the Senate vote on witnesses.
- Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a well-regarded political newsletter, tweeted today that the RealClearPolitics polling average of Mr. Trump’s approval rating appeared to be at its highest since the early days of his presidency.
- The three amigos, the deliverable and the SCIF: The Times put together a glossary of terms that keep popping up during the impeachment trial.
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