Opinion: Trump’s lawyers only have self-defeating arguments on the Bolton bombshell
Bolton is writing about his time in the Trump administration, a draft copy of which the New York Times said contains the former national security adviser’s revelations. “Maybe some reporters have an idea of maybe what it says,” Sekulow declared, implying that Times journalists cannot be trusted to properly represent the manuscript’s contents. “If you want to call that evidence — I don’t know what you’d call that — I’d call it inadmissible,” he said.
Sekulow’s more comprehensible objection — that some mysterious, unpublished manuscript the Times says it has seen is not admissible evidence at an impeachment trial — is worse for the president. If the Times cannot be trusted or if a draft manuscript is insufficient evidence of presidential wrongdoing, senators can and should get their own live account from Bolton and question the former Trump aide by simply calling him to testify.
Perhaps anticipating that the Trump team could not sensibly rebut the Bolton allegations or prevent his testimony, Sekulow and his colleagues repeatedly argued on Tuesday that, even if the Bolton account is true, the president still should not be removed from office, because doing so would “lower the bar” for impeachment. In fact, Sekulow would place the bar so high that even extreme abuses of presidential power would go unchecked.
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