House Intel Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) was on with Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night when he dropped some news that was pretty interesting in light of all that had gone on in the impeachment trial.
Last week, the impeachment trial was rocked by a New York Times story which claimed to have information about what was in the draft of a book by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. Supposedly the book contained comments about Trump wanting to link investigations to withholding aid to Ukraine. But there were several problems with this story. There were no quotes from the book in the story and it wasn’t even clear that’s what Bolton actually said, since he never confirmed it. Second, it was pretty much irrelevant anyway since there was never actually any quid pro quo made to Ukraine according to the Ukrainians, the witnesses who testified and the transcript of the Ukraine call that was at the crux of the matter.
Rachel Maddow mentioned “Bolton’s statements” uncritically without noting any of the above problems and spoke about how Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler had said that at some time in the future they might subpoena Bolton to testify. Schiff explained that there hadn’t been any decision made as to whether to subpoena Bolton. He said that he and Nadler had decided with the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi they would decide on that after the conclusion of the impeachment trial.
"...we did approach John Bolton’s counsel, asked if Mr. Bolton would be willing to submit an affidavit under oath, describing what he observed in terms of the President’s Ukraine misconduct, and he refused." -Rep. Adam Schiff pic.twitter.com/74uYvxFrqc
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 6, 2020
What he said next is where it gets interesting.
Schiff claims that after the vote against having more witnesses went down to defeat on Friday, Jan. 31, Democrats reached out to Bolton’s legal counsel to try to get an affidavit from Bolton about what he knew. According to Schiff, Bolton refused to submit such an affidavit.
So if that’s actually true, that means after all that, after all the nonsense that the Democrats pulled over it, Bolton wasn’t willing to speak up or isn’t able to back up the claimed report under oath.
So either he was only teasing something that wasn’t real just to hurt the president, or it really was just a trick to sell books. All the liberals who had embraced Bolton over the claim are now flipping on a dime saying to boycott his book.