NY Times:
Republicans are angrily pressing the White House in private about the revelations from the manuscript, saying they were blindsided by the former adviser’s account — especially because the administration has had a copy of it since Dec. 30. Many Republicans have adopted the arguments offered by Mr. Trump’s defense team, but Mr. Bolton’s assertions directly contradict them.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees. We went from “no witnesses, absolutely not” to threats about “if Bolton, then Hunter Biden and Obama” to “WH prepares for witnesses” in 24 hours. That’s… pretty amazing. Look, we all know what the GOP wants, but they may not get what the script calls for. Their problem is they do not know how to ad lib.
My heart breaks for them. Meanwhile, the witness vote is likely Friday.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun.
A report about a book by John Bolton makes the president’s Republican defenders look like liars and fools. Maybe they’ll be fine with that.
And then, Sunday night, it fell apart. The New York Times reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in his upcoming book that Trump made explicit the quid pro quo that his lawyers are denying: that Trump told him directly that he wanted to keep the military aid frozen until the Ukrainian government agreed to help with investigations of Democrats. Not only that, but apparently the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript all month. Trump’s team knew this was coming.
While I certainly don’t expect the president’s support in Congress to collapse, it’s impossible not to see close parallels to the “smoking gun” tape that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. That tape, proving that Nixon ordered his staff to have the Central Intelligence Agency block the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the Watergate scandal and released to Congress and the public after the House Judiciary Committee had passed articles of impeachment, was so devastating for Nixon not so much because it was proof of his crimes; plenty of proof of plenty of crimes had long since been placed in the record. Instead, it became the moment when conservative Republicans realized that Nixon had deliberately set them up with false arguments even though Nixon knew that the evidence, if released, would undermine those arguments and make them look like liars and fools.
Nikolas Bowie/NY Times:
Don’t Be Confused by Trump’s Defense. What He Is Accused of Are Crimes.
Abuse of power and obstruction of Congress have long been considered criminal and merit impeachment.
President Trump’s defense falls apart for precisely the same reason. As with burglary, American legal treatises and judicial opinions have long recognized the criminal offense of “abuse of power,” sometimes called “misconduct in office.” In 1846, the first edition of the pre-eminent treatise on American criminal law defined this common-law offense as when “a public officer, entrusted with definite powers to be exercised for the benefit of the community, wickedly abuses or fraudulently exceeds them.” The treatise noted that such an officer “is punishable by indictment, though no injurious effects result to any individual from his misconduct.”
Frank Figliuzzi and Karen Schwartz/NBC opinion:
Trump impeachment defense lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz share disturbing problem
While the president still stands accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women, two of his lawyers are embroiled in their own sexual misconduct and assault scandals.
There is a theorem that "creeps of a feather flock together." But there's more to it than the affinity bad men share for each other. The commonality between Trump's approach to life and the posture of the people he's selected to defend him echoes the "Access Hollywood" tape: "When you're a star, they let you do it."
Except now they — Trump, Starr and Dershowitz — are trying to collectively assault us all by defiling our Constitution. That should have every one of us, men and women alike, equally outraged.
Andrew McCarthy/NRO makes the case for shoddy defense work:
Bolton Blows Up Trump Team’s Foolhardy Quid Pro Quo Defense
They advanced an argument they didn’t need to make, and now it will cost them.
Don’t build your fortress on quicksand.
That’s been my unsolicited advice for President Trump and his legal team. You always want the foundation of your defense to be something that is true, that you are sure you can prove, and that will not change.
Instead, the president and his team decided to make a stand on ground that could not be defended, on facts that were unfolding and bound to change. Last night, that ground predictably shifted. In a soon-to-be-published memoir, former White House national-security adviser John Bolton asserts that the president withheld $391 million in defense aid in order to pressure Ukraine into investigating Trump’s potential 2020 election opponent, former vice president Joe Biden.
Neal K. Katyal, Joshua A. Geltzer and Mickey Edwards/NY Times:
John Roberts Can Call Witnesses to Trump’s Trial. Will He?
Democratic House managers should ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas for John Bolton and others.
The framers’ wisdom in giving this responsibility to a member of the judiciary expected to be apolitical and impartial has never been clearer. With key Republican senators having told the American people that they prejudged the case against President Trump before it began and even working with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to build the very defense for which they’re supposed to be the audience, the notion that they’re doing the “impartial justice” they’ve sworn to do is very much in question.
The Democrats’ impeachment managers should immediately ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas for key witnesses and documents, insisting that the Senate rules make him and him alone the decision maker about whether to “make and enforce” those subpoenas. That’s his prerogative — and his responsibility, one he can’t simply shift to the senators as permitted for evidentiary questions under the Rule VII carve-out.
What happens next won’t be totally within Democrats’ or the chief justice’s control. As Representative Adam Schiff acknowledged Thursday, the chief justice can decide evidence questions like executive privilege, but his determinations can be overruled by a majority of senators.
In Iowa news, Nate Cohn/NY Times:
Biden’s Iowa Problem: Our Poll Suggests His Voters Aren’t the Caucusing Type
Why there’s a wide split in recent surveys in the state.
This mismatch — between the voters who say they will participate in a caucus, and the voters who typically show up in primaries — may be at the heart of the wide split in recent Iowa polls.
Many pollsters rely, in some way, on past vote history to conduct their surveys. Some pollsters use it to define which voters could be selected to participate in a survey, like a recent Monmouth University poll that selected registered Democrats or independents who turned out in 2018 or in a recent primary, or who registered since 2018. A Neighborhood Research and Media poll was even more limited in its model for who was likely to vote: voters who turned out in either the 2016 or 2018 primary. These polls in Iowa showed Mr. Biden with the lead, and the Times/Siena poll also found Mr. Biden tied or ahead among these groups.
But new voters/young voters…
Bloomberg is passing Pete in the polls. More importantly, he’s on message and will fund beyond his candidacy.