John Bolton has teased his supposedly blockbuster book for months now, with quietly leaked claims that he knew of other impeachable incidents that fit the pattern of President Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine. The New York Times, which obtained an advance copy of The Room Where It Happened, reports that Bolton believed Congress should have dug into similar appeals Trump made to foreign adversaries in the explicit hopes of improving his reelection odds.
“Mr. Bolton, however, had nothing for scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed ‘impeachment malpractice’ by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons,” the New York Times writes.
He’s exactly right, both on the count of speed and scope, and it’s why Democrats destroyed what could have been a successful removal from office.
Democrats knew that a Republican-controlled Senate would never engage in the sort of fact-finding that would produce meaningful evidence against Trump. Even riskier, there were rumors that Republicans planned to turn their trial into a campaign against Hunter and Joe Biden. So the Democratic strategy behind the House impeachment proceedings made absolutely no sense. Given the political reality of a Republican-controlled Senate, Democrats needed to do the dirty work in gathering evidence before they voted to pass the articles of impeachment to Senate. They didn’t.
As Bolton will evidently make clear in his book, he wasn’t going to comply with such an incompetent and politicized impeachment investigation without a subpoena. Democrats refused to wait for a court to enforce their subpoena. In voting to impeach Trump without waiting for a court-ordered subpoena enforcement, they ensured that Bolton would never speak in the process, putting the nail on the coffin of their dreams of removing Trump from office.
Bolton also claims that Trump tried to use other foreign policy appeals to advance his electoral odds. If that’s true, Bolton might have been the only person who could have credibly supplied information causing Republican senators to break. House Democrats needed to establish a pattern with evidence much stronger than third-hand rumors that Trump was intentionally blocking the release of the Ukraine aid to get dirt on Hunter Biden.
Trump is probably right to be scared of Bolton’s book. But its details are probably a whole lot less scary, now that he can’t be removed from office because of them.
