John Bolton is feeling the heat
If John Bolton’s goal was to sell as many copies of his book as possible, he blew it badly. He refused to testify during House impeachment hearings because they took place too long before his book came out. Then he offered to testify during the Senate trial, which took place just as his book was going live for preorder, but was rebuffed by Republican Senators. He lost his opportunity for free promotion, and he enraged a whole lot of would-be buyers. Now Bolton is feeling the heat.
This week Bolton made his first public appearance since Donald Trump’s sham acquittal, at a nonpartisan event at Duke University. The event wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with Bolton’s book or his handling of impeachment, but it ended up being about that anyway. Bolton is clearly feeling the heat, if his answers to the questions are any indication.
NBC says that Bolton is accusing the House of “impeachment malpractice,” while asserting that his testimony “would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome” of the Senate trial. He’s full of it on both counts. He’s resorting to retroactively attacking the House’s handling of impeachment, as a way of trying to distract from his own unpatriotic refusal to testify to the House. And while his Senate testimony may not have resulted in the 67 votes required to remove Trump, it would have gone a long way to shaping the impeachment narrative heading into the 2020 election in November.
John Bolton sounds like a guy who had an iffy “master plan” for maximizing sales of his new book, and then watched it blow up in his face because he’s not as clever as he thinks he is, and now he’s stuck blaming others for the fact that everyone on both sides hates him. Bolton has always been a villain. He had his chance to do the right thing for once, and get rich in the process. Instead he found a way to screw it up. No wonder he’s getting defensive and feeling the heat.
