Impeachment latest: Senate impeachment trial upended by John Bolton revelations

Jay Sekulow, the President’s private counsel, alluded to the Bolton allegations during his opening remarks but suggested it would not be discussed by the team on Monday.

“What we’ve done on Saturday is the pattern that we’re going to continue today as far as how we’re going to deal with the case. We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all,” he said.

Hours into the trial on Monday, Bolton’s manuscript has not been directly addressed.

Sekulow said the team, including Judge Kenneth Starr, who led the investigation leading to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, would lay out an overview of “historical and constitutional issues with impeachment proceedings.”

Democrats ratcheted up the pressure on the Senate to call for witnesses in response to the draft book manuscript, while the President’s legal team debated how to address it during their argument on the Senate floor on Monday.

It’s a conversation that shifted far from where the President’s lawyers and Republican senators thought they were going this week when the President’s trial resumed. Republican sources thought Saturday they were confident that they had the votes to defeat a motion for additional witnesses and documents, leading to an acquittal vote by the end of the week.

Now that’s all in doubt.

“I can’t begin to tell you how John Bolton’s testimony would ultimately play on a final decision but it’s relevant,” Romney told reporters Monday. “And therefore, I’d like to hear it.”

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, said in a statement that the reports on Bolton’s book “strengthen the case for witnesses and have prompted a number of conversations among my colleagues.”

Republicans mixed on Bolton allegation

While Romney and Collins said the Bolton news strengthened the argument for calling him, other Republicans downplayed the need for Bolton be a witness or argued that it wasn’t relevant to deciding whether to convict the President on the two articles of impeachment.

Plus, they will reiterate that it was the House’s job to conduct the investigation, not the Senate’s.

“Unless there’s a witness that’s going to change the outcome, I can’t imagine why we’d want to stretch this out for weeks and months,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican in Senate leadership. “And if we call any witnesses that are subject to privilege, it would take weeks and months.”

Sen. Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans at their closed-door party lunch that senators shouldn’t lock themselves into a position before the defense team makes its case and senators ask questions, describing McConnell’s message as “take a deep breath, and take it one step at a time.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican close to Trump, pushed another argument: Republicans would call the Bidens if the Democrats push Bolton to testify.

“What I’ve said all along is if you’re going to add to the record, we’re going to do it in a balanced way. So let’s see what’s in the manuscript, let’s see if it’s relevant, and if it is, then I’ll make a decision about Bolton,” said Graham. “But I promise you this — if we add to the record, then we’re going to call Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, all these other people.”

There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden in Ukraine.

Both parties are turning their eyes toward two Republican senators in particular: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is not running for reelection.

“I said before I was curious about what Ambassador Bolton might have to say. I’m still curious,” Murkowski told reporters on Monday.

Alexander spoke briefly to reporters to note he was among the Republicans who fought to include in the trial rules a vote on whether to have witnesses. “I’ll decide then at that time,” he said.

Democrats seized on the new Bolton allegations, arguing that anyone seeking to learn the truth should want to hear from the President’s former national security adviser in light of the revelations.

“It completely blasts another hole in the President’s defense,” said House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff.

Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, said the Bolton news “makes it all the more clear why you can’t have a meaningful trial without witnesses and you certainly can’t have one without one without John Bolton.”

Trump team debates how to handle Bolton

The President denied Bolton’s allegations on Twitter early Monday morning, and continued to attack the impeachment trial and the managers as the trial was set to resume.

In the wake of the Bolton news, the President’s legal team wrestled with whether to address the manuscript directly on the Senate floor, according to a person briefed on the discussions. It became a major source of debate, with some advising it should be ignored while others said there’s no way they couldn’t talk about it.

In the hours after the Times broke the Bolton story, Republican senators began reaching out to the White House to control the damage. Both Graham as well as McConnell were in communication and there was an expressed view that the GOP Senate should have been kept in the loop.

One message conveyed to the White House, according to a GOP senator with knowledge of the conversations, was that Republicans were on the front lines of the trial and for them to be left without all available information was “malpractice.”

McConnell, a spokesman said, “did not have any advance notice” of the manuscript.

Bolton has flirted with testifying in the Senate impeachment trial for several weeks now after Democrats say his lawyer threatened to file suit if he were subpoenaed to testify during the House impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s defense continues

On the Senate floor, Sekulow argued that Democrats conducted “a pattern and practice of attempts over a three year period to not only interfere with the President’s ability to govern,” which he called “unsuccessful.”

Starr warned senators they were in what “can aptly be described as the age of impeachment,” as he argued that Trump’s impeachment was setting a dangerous standard, failed to charge the President with a crime and moved forward despite lacking any Republican support.

“Like war, impeachment is hell, or, at least, presidential impeachment is hell,” Starr said. “Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment understand that in a deep and personal way.”

Deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin argued that the impeachment article regarding obstruction of Congress “will forever damage the separation of powers” and considering it an impeachable offense would “itself be an abuse of power by Congress.”

And in her first remarks during the trial, Trump lawyer Jane Raskin offered a robust defense of Rudy Giuliani, saying that House managers did not provide “any direct evidence” incriminating the former New York City mayor and insisting he was not on a “political errand” for Trump, but rather, defending his client.

“Yes, Mayor Giuliani was President Trump’s personal attorney, but he was not on a political errand. As he stated repeatedly and publicly, he was doing what good defense attorneys do, he was following a lead from a well-known private investigator, and he was gathering evidence regarding Ukrainian election interference to defend his client against the false allegations being investigated by special counsel Mueller,” Raskin said.

She described Giuliani as a “minor player — that shiny object designed to distract you.”

The mood in the Senate chamber was somber as the defense team presented their argument, with Republicans and some Democrats taking copious notes. Senators were present and, largely, attentive, with no absences and no signs of any fidget spinners.

What happens next

After the defense team concludes its arguments, there will be 16 hours for senators to ask questions of both sides. The Senate’s trial rules then call for a debate and vote on whether the Senate generally should seek more witnesses and documents.

If that vote fails, the trial is likely to conclude with an acquittal vote this week. But if it succeeds, the trial will enter into an unpredictable phase where both senators and the legal teams could propose witnesses, which the Senate could vote on.

In addition to the debate over Bolton’s testimony, Schiff argued that the Senate must also seek his notes — as House Democrats were stonewalled from receiving documents from the Trump administration during the impeachment inquiry, even from witnesses who testified before the House.

“We learned John Bolton took detailed notes and presumably these are contemporaneous. These notes took place while the events were happening, while they were fresh in his mind. Those in many respects are more important than the manuscript,” Schiff said. “We ought to not only have John Bolton testify but we ought to see what he wrote down in his notes at the time.”

This story has been updated with additional developments Monday.