The Bolton Bombshell

Published Jan 28, 2020, 4:42 AM

A leak from John Bolton’s leak throws impeachment into chaos, President Trump’s legal team comes out swinging, and Senator Cruz sends at least one reporter up a wall.

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What a day. John Bolton throws impeachment into chaos. President Trump's legal team comes out swinging on their first full day of arguments, and the senator of this very podcast drives at least one journalist completely up a wall. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles. Thank you so much to all of the listeners who have kept this show at the top of the charts again now into our second week. What a big day. It started as a crazy day before the impeachment trial even began, because of a leak from the new memoir of John Bolton, the former National Security advisor, leaked to the New York Times, and it alleges that President Trump tied Ukraine aid to an investigation of the Biden's quid pro quo. He's guilty as charged, isn't that right? Well, today was a big and consequential day, and you're right, it started off crazy. We all had off yesterday, so I flew home, was home with my family, then came back to DC at the crack of dawn, walked into the Capitol. The press was going nuts. They were in a total tizzie The New York Times had broken the story that Bolton says there was a quid pro quo, and I got to say when I sat down at lunch today before we started the trial, there were a lot of Republican Senators who were feeling a little rattled by it. I mean, it was designed to shake people up in it. It had a little bit of that effect. I'm actually somewhat surprised that this shook up Republican senators because the story itself made all of these headlines a big splash. And yet it seems to me just reading about it, and especially given our previous conversations on how the quid pro quo was not really a big deal, that it's a lot of sizzle and no stake. Well, that's exactly right, and one of the most important things for people to understand. It does not matter if there was a quid pro quo or not. It does not matter. It doesn't make a difference for the issues before the sentence. Something we talked about last week in our first couple of podcasts. Look, quid pro quo sounds scary. It's a Latin phrase. I don't know what it means, but it sounds really bad all. Quid pro quo means as you exchange one thing for another, and this is not an exaggeration. Every president, yea, from George Washington to today has done quid pro quos by the hundreds, and foreign policy does it every single day. So whether or not it's a quid pro quote doesn't matter. The question is did the president commit high crimes and misdemeanors? And a quid pro quo is not. Whether it is or not, it is not the constitutional stand. So then why is this such a big headline? Because that was my reaction to I said, hold on, I got to talk to the Senator about this last week. I can see through the headline. Why is everybody making such a big deal about the John Bolton leak. Well, look, part of it was that the defense team on Saturday had some fun pointing out that the evidence was contradictory whether it was a quid pro quo or not. So they leaned in a little bit saying there wasn't clear evidence there was a quid pro quo, and so that let the New York Times say, oh goodness, now we have someone saying there was. It doesn't matter because look, quid pro quos. Obama's a rand deal is a quid pro quo. Right, Russia sanctions. I just passed last month sanctions on the Nord String to Russian gas pipeline. If a company builds the pipeline, they get sanctioned. That's a quid pro quo. You build the pipeline, you get sanctions. You're admitting to a quid pro quo right now. And Venezuela sanctions. We're telling Venezuela today that if Nicholas Maduro steps down from Venezuela, will lift sanctions. And we do by the way carrots and sticks all the time, where we'll give you aid, will impose sanctions. That's how we conduct foreign policies. So the Bolton leak, the quid pro quo news, that doesn't matter to the argument for impeachment itself. And yet surely it matters to the impeachment trial, because now we're hearing more reports that we could drag this thing out weeks and weeks and finally hear from the witnesses, which the Democrats have been asking for now for weeks. So I think the chances of the Senate hearing witnesses and of the trial being dragged on that those chances have increased. We will vote probably on Friday, whether or not additional witnesses will be brought in. All forty seven Democrats will vote yes, if four Republicans join them, if fifty one Republicans, if fifty one Senators vote yes, then we're going to have additional witnesses. Do you think that those four Republican senators will go over and now vote for the witnesses? Hey, you know, I'm not certain about that. I think there are a couple who have been pretty clear they will. I don't know if we get to four. And you know, one of the striking things, I don't know that I have seen two Senate meals more different than lunch today and dinner today. How so what's the difference? All right, So lunch today everyone had just out and back they were there. The press was all in a frenzy about John Bolton. We're talking about, oh, we gotta have witnesses, quit pro quo. Not sure what quid pro quo is. And then we had this afternoon where the Trump defense team finally got to put on their arguments and their evidence and listen, as you know, I have been begging them put on systematically. Clearly the evidence of Barissma and Hunter, Biden and Joe Biden, all of the evidence of corruption. That's what matters. The central question in this trial is whether a president can investigate corruption, and the answer to that is obviously yes, if they're real incredible allegations of corruption. With Hunter and Joe Biden, Barissma that there was enormous evidence of corruption. We finally heard that today and by dinner time the Republican senators were happy. The last serene it was totally different because we'd just gone through several hours of the actual defense in the case, which finally got to be able to put onto. Okay, well, I want to get into those arguments then, because this was a pivotal day. We got a little preview of the Trump team's arguments on Saturday, but today was the first full day. Last week the Democrats make their arguments, and then this week the Trump team gets to do it. It opened up with Ken Starr, who was the star of the Clinton impeachment trial back in the nineties. Then it went on to some of President Trump's other lawyers. Toward the end, you get Alan Dershowitz, very famous lawyer, a professor of yours. I believe you know him well. Taught me criminal law one oh one my first week in law school, and I've known him twenty five thirty years. So I hate to put you on the spot because you know one of the lawyer. You know multiple lawyers who were arguing today. How did they do? They did very well. This was a very good day for President Trump. This was a very bad day for the Democrats. And I gotta say watching the Democrats at council table, when Pam Bondi got up, when so Pam Bondi is won a President Trump's law right and Eric Hirshman, who are two of the lawyers for the for President Trump, they both got up and they laid out the evidence of Barisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company that was built in corruption, that was paying Hunter Biden a million bucks a year. And they finally showed the tape of Joe Biden bragging about how you want to talk about quid pro quo? So on Donald Trump. The evidence is conflicting on whether there's a quid pro quo. There's some evidence that some testimony said there was, some testimony said there was. It doesn't matter, do you know, the one undisputed quit pro quo in this in this entire proceeding, Joe Biden. Joe Biden on video said he told the President of Ukraine he would block a billion dollars in aid unless he fired the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Barisma, which was paying his son Hunter Biden a million bucks a year. And as you know, Biden ends it with going, well, son of a bitch, they fired him. That's a quid pro quo, and Biden not only admits to it, he brags about it. He's proud. And I got to say playing that, I think the Trump team did a good job laying it out. I think they walked through the evidence. But but I spent a good chunk of it just watching the house manager's faces. I gotta say Adam Schiff was ashen. I mean really that their faces were horrifying because we couldn't see that. I certainly didn't see that they so you would see him kind of try to smile and like puff up his chest and then it sort of slumped down. But the interesting thing is they knew this was coming. It's why several days ago, I said, the house managers through Joe Biden un the bus because when they spend several hours of their presentation making the case that there is zero evidence to investigate Borismo or the Biden's for corruption, which is a laughable proposition, they knew to a metaphysical certainty that today would happen. In other words, they knew. They knew about the Son of a Bitch video. I mean, it's not like they're living in a cave and they set it up. They team about the video we played last week on the podcast where ABC asked Hunter Biden, would you have gotten this job been paid a million bucks a year if your name wasn't Biden. He's like, no, I mean, they knew that was coming, but it was still painful. But did you know that the Trump team would be so aggressive because I going into it, I had this fear, and we talked about it on the show that the Trump team would play it cautious, play it's safe, simply answer the Democrat accusations from last week, and instead they got pretty aggressive. Well, I think they heard from a lot of voices that they needed to affirmatively present the president's defense that the president is innocent and there's a reason he's innocent. It is perfectly okay, and in fact that the president's got a responsibility if there's credible evidence of corruption to investigate that evidence. Yeah, and you know it was striking. You remember in the first couple of days, Jerry Nadler, one of the house managers, he said, out of hundreds of thousands of Ukraine companies, why would Trump be interested in this one? And the screaming answer as well, as far as I know, it's the only Ukrainian company that was paying the son of the vice president a million bucks a year. And the point is, it's not about some abstract interest in Ukrainian corruption. It's not like the President's worried about someone knocking off seven elevens in Ukraine. Right, This is about American corruption. This is about the prospect of a corrupt foreign company effectively bribing the vice president of the the United States. Now that may not be the case. I'm not saying that happened, but there's more than enough evidence to investigate it and find out whether it did. So you think that the Trump team did a good argument, Ken Star, Alan Dershowitz, everybody in the middle. I actually think that the biggest fireworks of the day were not presented by the Trump legal team. I think they were presented by you when you were talking to the press, because during one of these breaks you had a press gaggle. You were answering their questions and speaking to them. You, more than anybody that I've seen, have been very aggressive on this, saying that this impeachment is about Bisma, it's about corruption in Joe, a potential corruption by Joe Biden in the Obama administration. Go after that. I think you got under the press's skin so much that at one point, one of these reporters suggested throwing your nine year old daughter in jail. Do we have the clip? Basically got a job that vice president? If that's a crime, I name, shouldn't half of your children be in prison? My children are nine and eleven. I'm sorry that you want to throw a nine year old in prison, but at this point, my my third grader plays basketball and softball at our school. So so stop playing the nasty no, no, stop playing the nasty Washington game attacking a nine year old. All right? You know, I I love that you kept your cool there and you kind of laughed it off, but that is pretty deranged for a reporter to say they want to throw your kid in jail. Well, you know, it shows the desperation of the press corps. So Trump has had a lot of consequences for America, many of which have been fantastically good in terms of policy, in terms of substance. One of which that has been also really really good is exposing the rampant bias of the media. And Donald Trump has broken the media that their role right now is they're desperate to be the defenders of the Democrats. And so I had just finished standing up and saying today with devastating for the house managers and walking through a little bit of the evidence of corruption that was laid out, the media doesn't want to cover any of this. So what that guy was doing, I mean he was trying to say, well, everybody does it, Come on, your kids do it? And they're desperately Okay, so I got news for the media. No, everybody doesn't do this. I promise you. If there's anybody else in Washington that has a kid making a million bucks a year from a corrupt company that is getting favors from the Vice president of the United States, that ain't something everybody does. Like. Look, I mean it's they're trying to cover it up as Oh, it's Uncle Joe, it's no big deal. This is bad stuff. This stinks. You know. One of the things the Trump's defense team did today is they played from the ABC clip with Hunter Biden a component. We still don't know, by the way, how much money Hunter Biden made. Well, we know he was driving around Hollywood in a very expensive Porsche, so I think he did pretty well well. An ABC asked him, so, how much did this corrupt Ukrainian natural gas company pay you while your dad was vice president? And why while he was leading Ukraine policy for the Obama administration, And he said, well, I'm not going to tell you. I don't have to be open kimono. Well, do you know that nobody knows how much he was paid with We know it was at least eighty three thousand dollars a month, but he's never answered that, and the house managers have no desire to know the answer to that. Well, what's so shocking to me about many of these interviews, and that clip in particular, is the media have been going after not just you, but a lot of Republican senators, and they've been assailing you all for not being objective and completely without an interest in this impeachment trial, because you know your Republicans. Of course, in impeachment trials different than other trials, right, you're going to have interests on both sides. The one group that is supposed to remain disinterested objective is the media. And then the moment you get over the target of what this impeachment is all about, they clearly lose their minds. Well, you know, Judge ken Starr started the argument today and he did a very good job of pointing out so a lot of folks in the media like to say, oh, the senators are jurors. That's not in fact, right. And in the Clinton impeachment trial, a Democrat senator objected to senators being called jurors, and Chief Justice Rank quest sustain the objection. Starb actually put it very well. The Senate is a court, which means the Senate where the judges, where the jurors were deciding questions of law and fact. And we're not supposed to be disconnected from the process. The framers knew what they were doing when they handed it to the upper Chamber of Congress. But you know what we do need to do is keep the focus on the actual legal question, which is whether high crimes or misdemeanors were committed. And it's why. Look, the fundamental answer, the reason the House Manager's case fails and the president will be acquitted is because presidents, it's not an impeachable offense to investigate credible evidence of corruption. By the way, it would have been very different if Trump had said to Ukraine, hey, would you concoct some fake and bogus material on Joe Biden and fraudulently accused him of something. Look, we'd have a totally different case there, right, But that's not what he said. All of the evidence, one hundred percent of it said investigate what happened. This is bad Biden bragged about getting the prosecutor fired. It is not an impeachable offense to investigate credible evidence of corruption. That's the issue that matters, and the press is going to try to change the subject. You know what, this this Bolton bombshell today. It won't be the last bombshell. We'll see another one coming up later this week. And actually, a bunch of us in the Judiciary Committee who went through Kavanaugh, Yeah, we were saying we're kind of stealed to this because we saw I remember, day after day there was another revelation. By the end of it, they had him in high school, like drugging people and like participating in you know, all sorts of I mean, it got Remember Michael Avanettie, briefly the media wanted him to be the Democratic nominee. He was this lawyer who would go on CNN. This was during now Justice Kavanaugh's information hearings to the Supreme Court. It was the timing of every big scandal bombshell. It seems so perfectly coordinated. And that's what I mean, that is the big news of the day. Is this Bolton bombshell. I'm sure you're right it won't be the last. But for those of us who don't know the inner machinations, how this was leaked, who leaked it, Who's going to leak the next one? I guess the question all of us have is what happens next. Let's say that because of this bombshell from John Bolton, we now get witnesses and this trial drags on well passed Saturday, maybe for weeks and weeks. What are we going to look forward to next? So we don't know for sure. Tomorrow will be the last day of arguments opening arguments for the Trump legal defense team. Okay, so they'll start tomorrow at one o'clock. Go as long as they go. Then the next two days we're gonna have questions from senators eight hours a day for two days. We ask questions, but we don't get to ask them ourselves. We write them down and the Chief Justice asked them for us. So I will say to the folks listening to this podcast, if you have questions that you want me to ask, either the House managers or Trump's legal defense team, suggest them you can. You can tweet them. I'm at Ted Cruz and just put hashtag verdict. And we are looking at what's what's what's online on Twitter and looking for questions that will help help focus on the issues that matter. After the questions are over, then at the end of the week, we're going to vote up or down our additional witnesses necessary. If we get fifty one Senators who say yes, then frankly, it's Katie bar the door. If it ends up that there are four Republicans who join the Democrats and say, okay, we need to hear from John Bolton, I think that's possible. I will give you some good news if that happens. I'm extremely confident we will also hear from Hunter Biden. So you don't think there's a world in which they vote for witnesses. But the only witness who is called is John Bolton's zero, chancel zero. And the Democrats are terrified about that. You know, Chuck Schumer's like, no, no no, no, we can't call Hunter Biden. You're seeing Democratic senators going no, no, no, don't call Hunter Biden. Look, today's testimony revealed if there's one witness that was called, it should be Hunter Biden because he's right at the center. And remember, the issue is not Hunter Biden. I don't know the guy. It looks like he's led to a pretty troubled life. The question is not even about whether he's involved in corruption. It's about whether his father, the vice president, who was making the Obama administration's policy and leading it, whether he was involved in corruption. And that's a question that goes right to the heart of Trump's asking it to be an investigated. And I want to underscore a point we said last week because it people may not have focused on its importance, and it's about to become very very important. If we have witnesses, which is if Hunter Biden has called as a witness. If we subpoena Hunter Biden, he will almost certainly plead the fifth He'll almost certainly come in and say I refuse to answer questions. And he has a right under the under the Bill of right. He doesn't want to testify and admit to committing a crime. Here's a piece almost nobody knows if he does that. There is a statute that explicitly gives the Senate the power to give him testimonial immunity, which means he would be immune from being prosecuted for what he says in his testimony. Why does that matter? You may think, gosh, immunity sounds like a good thing for him, It's actually not, because immunity means we can force him to testify, because we want to get the evidence of what did your dad know? You know. One of the interesting things that we heard today, So Hunter Biden had two business partners. It's guy Devin Archer was also on the border Barisma, and then John Kerry's son in law. What a coincidence or not? Son in law stepson rather and his stepson when his two business partners joined the board. He sent an email to the State Department to his stepfather's chief of staff saying, Devin and Hunter have joined the board of Barisma. I don't know why they did this, but I got nothing to do with it, and he broke off doing business with them because of their poor judgment in getting paid millions from this corrupt company. You know, we actually got a mail bag question specifically about the ability of the Senate to force Hunter Biden to testify. And the question comes from Susan. If the Senate forces Hunter Biden to testify by granting him immunity, would he also receive immunity if he perjured himself during the testimony? So if he lies, so, immunity does not immunize you from perjury, and it doesn't immunize you from the underlying crimes. But it does it does prevent any prosecutor from using your testimony as evidence against you. Well, then there's a similar follow up. And by the way, the way the statute works is the Senate fifty one senators vote to grant immunity. We then have to go to a federal district court and file that But the District Court has to grant it. Right, it's mandator into the statute that I've seen that nowhere in the press. Obviously, I think Hunter Biden's probably sweating about that, and the Democrats in the House are probably sweating. Joe Biden is sweating more. And by the way, I'll tell you some of the happiest faces in that Senate where Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and Klobuchar. Now, I mean they this was a bad, bad day for the House Democrats case, but also for Joe Biden was this was not pretty. So let's say President Trump gets off the hook, he is not removed from office. Matthew asks, does the Fifth Amendment regarding double jeopardy attach? Should the Senate exonerate the president? Can the president be tried again for the same articles. I don't think we've ever seen that situation in history. So impeachment and prosecution for chrim defense are two different matters. So yes, you can be tried separate. Now, you've got to prove a crime. You got to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And amazingly enough, the House managers have an alleged a crime. It's one of the things actually, Alan Dershowitz. Professor Dershowitz at the end did a really good job of walking through the constitutional history that you can't high crimes or misdemeanors, requires that you prove that the president has committed a crime on the order of treason or bribery, because that's what the Constitution said, And it was very interesting. Professor Dershowitz walked through a couple of other provisions of the Constitution which almost no one knows who's looked at this. So you know the impeachment clause, but there are two other places where impeachment is referenced in the Constitution beyond the power of impeachment and the trial. The impeachment clause just saying that the Congress has the power to impeach the president and the Senate will conduct the trial. And actually the Constitution uses the word soul twice says the House has the sole power of impeachment and the Senate has the sole power to try impeachment. So the only times the word sol is used in the Constitution concerns impeachment. But there are two other references. Number one in Article two concerns the presidency. It gives the president the power to grant pardons and reprieves for offenses against the United States except in cases of impeachment. So the president can't pardon impeachment. But it also says offenses against the United States which are crimes. In Article three of the Constitution, which concerns the judiciary, the Constitution says trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury. Now, what does that imply? Impeachment are crimes, And so the House Democrats have admitted that they aren't alleging a crime. So this is a unique historical situation inasmuch as we have the impeachment going on, but when the Congress impeach the president, they did not accuse him of a crime. So are you saying we're just in uncharted territory. We are. It has never happened in history that a president has been impeached without the article's alleging he's committed a crime. And actually, something ken Starr said that was really powerful. We have never before in history seen a president impeached on a pure partisan vote. Only Democrats voted for it. And ken Starr made a great point. You know, the Constitution requires for conviction to remove a President two thirds of the Senate. Impeachment was supposed to be a consensus, a national consensus that this crosses a high threshold. There ain't that consensus, and so fighting this is just a partisan battle. The way the Democrats are doing is wrong. You know. The conclusion I draw from all of this is one of anxiety because we are in uncharted territory here. I think it's going to make the question time on Thursday so important. So please, to all of our listeners, get your questions in, tweet them at Ted Cruz, use the hashtag verdict, and we will try to get those questions asked during the impeachment trial. Then you can come back here afterwards. You know this is an early night, it's not even midnight yet. You've made it over from the Capitol and we will go through all of it. Then, thank you. Two things I want to follow up on quickly because I have been given an assignment. Okay, so last week you'll recall I mentioned that I brought up with Caroline, my eleven year old daughter, when we had risen to the number three podcasts in the country. I called her and told her and she said, Dad, I really don't care. So I got home Saturday night. Sunday yesterday, I was home and I told Caroline, you know, we rose from number three all the way to number one, and look, I thought that was kind of you know, you know, trying to like, you know, get my daughter to think that's cool. And she said, I know, and you passed Joe Rogan. And she said, and Joe Rogan interviewed Robert Downey Junior, and that's the coolest thing in the world. Caroline is like obsessed with Iron Man and she's like, if he interviewed Robert Downey Junior. I don't know how you passed him, Dad, I don't know how that happened, but that's really cool. That's six to agrees of Kevin Bacon. And I gotta say, for any dat of an eleven year old, it is really hard to like impress an eleven year old with anything. So I thought it was very cool that passing Joe Rogan did it with Caroline Cruise and that that made me pretty happy. And there's a coincidence we passed Joe Rogan's show with this show Verdict with Ted Cruz just about a day or two after Joe endorsed Bernie Sanders is that a coincidence? Look, I think it's it's cause and effect. But let me said, everyone listening, if you haven't subscribed and signed up for this podcast going forward, please do because because this uh, we're having fun, we really appreciate it, and it looks like with everything and uncertainty, I'll probably being stuck in DC for quite a while now, so be sure to tune back. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruise is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action can he dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country. In twenty twenty two, Job's Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.