Trump administration officials took aim at ousted White House national security adviser John Bolton, attacking his credibility following reports he regarded the Ukraine controversy as a major scandal.
“John Bolton never complained to me about it,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday. “No one at NSC ever complained to me about anything that was going on.”
The comment was a rebuttal to the notion that Bolton viewed President Trump’s push for Ukrainian investigations into the Democratic Party and former Vice President Joe Biden as little better than a “drug deal.”
A similar rebuttal came from another key figure in the controversy.
“If Ambassador Bolton, Dr. Hill, or others harbored any misgivings about the propriety of what we were doing, they never shared those misgivings with me, then or later,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the U.S. envoy to the European Union, said Thursday in his prepared statement to House investigators. “Neither Ambassador Bolton, Dr. Hill, nor anyone else on the NSC staff ever expressed any concerns to me about our efforts, any complaints about coordination between State and the NSC, or, most importantly, any concerns that we were acting improperly.”
Sondland’s testimony, along with Mulvaney’s ensuing comments, exposes a dispute between current Trump officials and their former colleagues. The dispute has drawn notice from House investigators.
“I was just surprised that he said that, because I thought there would be more communication,” Florida Rep. Francis Rooney, a Republican member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said about Sondland. “There was plenty of communication going on, I was just surprised that he said Bolton didn’t say anything to him.”
Sondland and Mulvaney found themselves in the spotlight last week after former National Security Council official Fiona Hill reportedly testified that Bolton accused them of “cooking up” the Ukraine controversy with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. “Giuliani’s a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” Bolton reportedly told Hill.
Mulvaney and Sondland maintain that they sought only for Ukraine to pursue the kinds of legitimate corruption investigations that Republicans and Democrats agree need to take place. In their telling, Bolton either whistled past the scandal or is orchestrating an attack on Trump based on unfair criticisms.
“Fiona Hill never got a chance to complain to [Sondland],” Mulvaney told Fox News’ Chris Wallace sarcastically. “[Hill] works for John Bolton. Yet, John Bolton didn’t go say anything to anybody. Doesn’t that raise a red flag?”
The dispute could press Bolton’s allies either to soften their criticism of Trump or to reveal additional information about the controversy.
“There could be more specifics, for instance, like Fiona’s description of her conversation with Bolton about the ‘drug deal,’ so that would give more color and more weight, more momentum,” a former senior U.S. official, discussing the apparent feud on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “And then the question becomes, will more detail ultimately change minds?”
Bolton, whose tenure in the Trump administration ended with an acrimonious split, hasn’t testified before the committee. But House Democrats are mulling a subpoena of the scorned official.
“I’m sure he’s got a lot of reasons why he might want to speak against the president, but I don’t know,” Nevada Rep. Dina Titus, a Democratic member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “They’re issuing other subpoenas for witnesses next week so they may try to get him here. And, now that he’s not officially working in the White House, he may have more leeway to want to come and speak.”
