Republicans in the U.S. Senate came under fresh pressure on Monday to allow witnesses and new documents in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial after a news report that a former top aide has a written a book manuscript that undercuts Trump’s versions of events in the Ukraine affair.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a sometime critic of Trump, said there was a growing likelihood that at least four Republican senators would vote to call for former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, which would give Democrats the votes necessary to summon him.
The New York Times cited the manuscript of an unpublished book by Bolton as saying that the Republican president told him he wanted to freeze security aid to Ukraine until Kiev helped with investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
If confirmed, the report would add weight to Democrats’ accusations that Trump used the $391 million in aid – approved by the U.S. Congress to help Ukraine combat Russia-backed separatists – as leverage to get a foreign country to help him dig up dirt on a domestic political rival. Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation and author of Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World and Private Sector, Public Wars – Contractors in Combat, Jim Carafano, is curious about what information John Bolton could have with Dan & Amy: