Last week, reports indicated that John Bolton’s lawyers were in touch with officials working on the three House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.
Bolton’s name has come up repeatedly during testimony from current and former officials, usually in the context of concerns he voiced about the involvement of Rudy Giuliani in a pressure campaign aimed at compelling the Volodymyr Zelensky government in Ukraine to commit publicly to investigations of Trump’s political rivals.
The most compelling testimony in that regard came from Bolton aide Fiona Hill, who suggested to lawmakers that Bolton was aghast at the situation, going so far as to call the whole thing a “drug deal“. Giuliani, Bolton assessed, was a “hand grenade”.
Additional reports indicated Bolton in August told Bob Lighthizer that Trump wasn’t likely to restore trade privileges to Ukraine, something House Democrats will also be interested in hearing about.
On Wednesday, former special adviser for Ukraine negotiations Christopher Anderson told Congress that Bolton warned about the potential for Giuliani to jeopardize US efforts to establish cordial relations with the Zelensky government. Here’s a passage from Anderson’s opening statement:
On June 13, I accompanied Ambassador Volker to a meeting with National Security Advisor John Bolton. In that meeting, Bolton stated that he agreed with our three lines of effort and that he also supported increased senior White House engagement. However, he cautioned that Mr. Giuliani was a key voice with the President on Ukraine which could be an obstacle to increased White House engagement. He did suggest that perhaps the Vice President would be available to travel to Toronto to meet with President Zelenskyy in early July at the Ukraine Reform Conference that the Canadian government was hosting. We later learned that the Vice President would not attend the conference. The morning after the meeting, I sent a brief message to Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent summarizing the meeting and relaying NSA Bolton’s message about Mr. Giuliani. I sent around a more formal summary later that day to my State Department colleagues.
Given all of this, you can understand why House impeachment investigators want to hear from Bolton in person and, if they have their way, John (and his mustache) will be on Capitol Hill as early as next week.
“House Democrats have scheduled depositions for two figures at the center of the impeachment inquiry: former national security adviser John Bolton and top White House lawyer John Eisenberg”, CBS reported on Wednesday afternoon, adding that Bolton’s deposition “is set for November 7, and Eisenberg [was] told to appear on November 4”.
It was Eisenberg, you’re reminded, who ordered the account of Trump’s now infamous phone call with Zelensky to be sequestered away on a code-word server, where it remained until the transcript was released by Trump himself.
As noted last week, it’s not known whether Bolton would deliver a damning account even if he were to go before lawmakers. That said, the White House would surely prefer it if John simply refrained from saying anything at all, unless he intends to deliver effusive praise of the administration.
Spent the entire day digging into impeachment and executive powers and looking forward to see what happens with Bolton. It’s still mind boggling to think about the Senate shooting down all the impeachment articles, without realistically looking at evidence or playing the part of an honest jury in a trial. There is a case to be made that a person is innocent until proven guilty, but to be fair, the Senate jury is not only biased, they are in league with the man on trial and supportive of his criminal activities — conspirators, collaborators co-partners, sycophants, boot-lickers, crooks and people without honor. Thus, how is that jury going to weigh evidence, or how would a gang of gangsters feel about being the jury for a mobster boss — or a group of terrorists that seek accountability?
I ran across two points tonight, one, this impeachment should be about bribery and two, as the impeachment articles are handed to the Senate, history will record this event and as it plays out and as voters in America watch the Senators, they will be on trial, just as much as trump — and maybe that’s why we’re seeing this all get fast-tracked. If in fact, trump’s fellow monsters treat this as a non-event and disrespect law and show themselves to be totally corrupt, they will all be held accountable by the same people that were booing at trump during the baseball game. The same people that booed cheney at a baseball game, the same people that will expel them from office! Maybe, that’s the solution anyway, i.e.,with all the politics and chaos, there will be no actual justice in the sense that trump ends up in prison being defiled — but in a broader sense he and his gang will be humiliated and end as cartoon characters that got what they deserved.
I also wonder about Justice Roberts presiding over this circus, what rues will he be bound by and will he allow a circus o take place and have that be the hilight of his term at SCOTUS? Is this like other trials, where he can over rule a jury, can he ask questions or does he just sit there and take orders from Moscow mitch and trump? The Impeachment rule book needs to be looked at, but I’m 100% confident there are no issues with executive powers vested in the Orange Clown!
Anyway:
The understanding of bribery at the Founding maps perfectly onto Trump’s conduct in his call with Zelensky. As noted above, Trump made clear to Zelensky that he was asking him for a “favor”–not a favor to benefit the United States as a whole or the public interest, but a favor that would accrue to the personal benefit of Trump by harming his political rival. Trump’s request that Zelensky work with his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, underscores that Trump was seeking a private benefit. And Trump was not seeking this “undue reward” (to quote “Russell on Crimes” and the Delaware statute) as a mere aside unrelated to the president’s official role. Rather, he did so in the course of an official diplomatic conversation with a head-of-state.
The transcript makes clear that Trump tied together the request for a personal favor with the delivery of military aid. But even if he had not made such a direct connection, this sort of corrupt use of public office to obtain a private benefit fits squarely within the definition of bribery when the Constitution was written.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/constitution-says-bribery-impeachable-what-does-mean
Impeachment as Judicial Selection?
Unlike a judicial precedent, no single voice speaks for the House or Senate authoritatively or clearly. These non-judicial precedents, even more so than judicial precedents, are susceptible to multiple and inconsistent characterization. In an impeachment, no majority opinion limits the precedential effect by stating a holding. The rationale for particular outcomes is indiscernible.
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The four corners of an article of impeachment and the vote indicate an outcome. The outcome is a Spartan civilian announcement of a case outcome rather than a common law opinion providing a ratio decidendi. More-over, the softness of impeachment’s political stare decisis means that the Senate has no effective mechanism for overruling an aberrant prior case’s potential precedential effect. Over time, the result will be a loosening of the grounds for impeachment. That is, there could be ten cases where impeachment on a nonindictable offense was not permitted, but a single instance where it is. That one case, which arguably ignored the other “precedents,” now displaces the ten prior cases by creating a precedent that may be cited in preference to the others and in favor of broader congressional prerogative.
Thus, disputants may pick impeachment precedents they prefer and ignore the others.
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That senators lack any right to debate during the on-the-record open session amplifies this
point.
SENATE IMPEACHMENT RULE XXIV, SENATE MANUAL,S.DOC.NO. 101-1, at 189 (1989).
Further, the Constitution requires that senators trying an impeachment “shall be on Oath or Affirmation.”
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What is the meaning of being under the oath? Gouverneur
Morris characterized the oath as a safeguard against senators untruthfully concluding that a crime had been committed or finding that a state of affairs was the case, when it was not.
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“[T]here could be no danger that the Senate would say untruly on their
oaths that the President was guilty of crimes or facts, especially as in four years he can be turned out.”
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Morris recognized that the appeal to high motives (e.g., honoring
an oath) might need to be tempered with an acknowledgment of low ones, i.e., the pragmatic motive that lying would be unnecessary given the regular republican
remedy of election. This oath taking is consistent with the extensive practice of the Senate referring to itself as a “court” of impeachment.
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Second, impeachment is “political” in the sense that legislators are elected representatives, but the proceeding is not “political” in the sense that there are no legal standards and that it could be a free-ranging
inquiry into political offenses. Of course, legislators could engage in the impeachment equivalent of jury bias (a non-merits conviction) or jury nullification (a non-merits acquittal). Every criminal trial in
America is “political” in this sense. But that does not imply there are no controlling legal standards.
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1167&context=wmborj
Length?