John Bolton Book Will Detail How Donald Trump Tied Ukraine Aid To Investigations, ‘New York Times’ Reports
On Tuesday, the first day on the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, all 53 Senate Republicans voted to quash a move by Democrats to subpoena John Bolton, the former national security adviser who had publicly stated that he was willing to testify if the Senate called him. Now, less than a week after the 53-47 party-line vote against hearing evidence from Bolton, a New York Times report on an upcoming book by the former Trump administration official reveals that his testimony could change the course of the entire trial.
Bolton has recently circulated drafts of his book manuscript among close associates, as well as to the White House for a routine review of its content. Some of those who have read the manuscript described what Bolton has to say to Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt.
In the book, Bolton reveals that in August, Trump directly told him that he would continue holding up a nearly $400 million, congressionally-approved military aid package for Ukraine “until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats,” including the Democratic primary frontrunner, former United States Vice President Joe Biden, The Times reported.
The Times last month reported that Bolton — along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper — met with Trump in August in an attempt to persuade him to release the aid to Ukraine, which has been fighting a bloody war against a Russian invasion since 2014.
In that meeting, according to the Times report, Trump complained that the U.S. was “p*ssing away our money” by sending aid to Ukraine. But the earlier New York Times report did not include Bolton’s claim that Trump told him explicitly about the direct linkage between aid to Ukraine and the country’s willingness to announce an investigation into Biden.
A newly-released audio recording of an April 2018, dinner with top donors — made public by Lev Parnas, a close associate of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani — shows that Trump was told that Ukraine could not survive its war with Russia without U.S. aid. But the following year, he illegally withheld the nearly-$400 million aid package.
Also at that 2018 dinner, as revealed by the recording, Trump was told that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was regularly disparaging him, and openly predicting his impeachment. In reponse, Trump immediately ordered an aide to “take her out.”
But according to the Times account of Bolton’s book manuscript, not only were those allegations against Yovanovitch baseless, Pompeo knew that they were false. In fact, Pompeo told Bolton that Giuliani “may have” sought Yovanovitch’s ouster because her own efforts to combat corruption in Ukraine were targeting Giuliani’s business associates.
