We told you John Bolton was going down

| 10:15 pm EST January 23, 2019
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Back when Donald Trump first revealed that he was hiring John Bolton to be his White House National Security Adviser, most political observers opined that it must have something to do with starting some unspecified land war. Palmer Report pointed out that Bolton had just gotten exposed in the Trump-Russia scandal, and that Trump was obviously hiring Bolton to keep him from flipping, and that Bolton would end up going down anyway. In this instance, we love to say we told you so.

At the time, we didn’t think it was particularly difficult to piece together what was really going on. Cambridge Analytica, which had deep financial ties to John Bolton and deep connections to Russia, had just been pulled front and center in the Trump-Russia scandal. Russian spy Maria Butina had also just come to the forefront of the Trump-Russia scandal, as had her close ties to Bolton. There was no longer any question that Bolton was an agent of Russia on at least some level. Just as this became clear, Trump decided to bring Bolton into the fold.

On Wednesday, new House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings revealed that he’s targeting John Bolton for his numerous ties to the Trump-Russia scandal and to the Kremlin. This is a big deal because, while we’ve always assumed Special Counsel Robert Mueller was busy getting to the bottom of Bolton’s role in the scandal, there has been virtually no mainstream public discussion of Bolton’s status as a Russian agent. That’s about to change in a big way.

For instance, as a result of Elijah Cummings’ announcement, Rachel Maddow devoted most of the first segment of her MSNBC show on Wednesday night to laying out John Bolton’s ties to Russia. As we’ve learned, where Maddow takes things, other TV hosts and pundits end up tending to follow. Once the House Oversight Committee begins holding public hearings into Bolton, it’ll become a front page story. It’s clear Bolton is going down; now we know that he’s going to go down in public.