(June 18) Every Senate Republican except for Mitt Romney now owns every single damaging revelation about President Trump reported in the memoir of former national security adviser John Bolton.
Those revelations should stick to the GOP senators like Velcro. They have covered for Trump, ignored his instability and indecency, excused his lies and ignorance, and willfully pretended his corruptions don’t exist. And they had every chance to examine much of this, especially the corruption, from Bolton while he was under pain of perjury. Instead, they cowered, told Bolton to stay away, and made a mockery of their oaths to try an impeachment trial in (anything approaching) an unbiased fashion.
They owed it to their constituents to hear Bolton under oath back then, both to see if what he said held dispositive relevance to any grounds for impeachment and also because the public deserved context for the charges against the president. Well, now the public knows what it was the Senate Republicans tried to hide, and it’s not pretty. Worse, rather than being the honest men who elicited the information from Bolton, they look like the pro-Nixon diehards who went down with the Watergate ship in 1974.
The GOP’s choice was simple: Hear from the highest-ranking official who was a direct witness to some of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, or instead promote the fiction that if the House didn’t call a witness, the witness’s testimony would be irrelevant or even invalid. Of course, the opposite is true: A trial that forbids testimony from relevant witnesses is invalid. Worse, those who conduct such a trial are grossly derelict in their duties.
In this case, nobody can seriously doubt the veracity of Bolton’s numerous damaging claims about Trump. First, Bolton may be accused of many things, but he’s a noted straight shooter, sometimes to his own detriment. …
[The full column is at this link.]