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'Impeachment malpractice'

As excerpts of Bolton's manuscript began leaking Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led Democrats' impeachment effort, slammed Bolton in no uncertain terms.

"Bolton's staff were asked to testify before the House to Trump's abuses, and did," Schiff tweeted. "They had a lot to lose and showed real courage. When Bolton was asked, he refused, and said he'd sue if subpoenaed. Instead, he saved it for a book. Bolton may be an author, but he's no patriot."

Trump allies have directly accused Bolton of trying to sell books with incendiary claims, noting that he was paid $2 million for the memoir.

Democrats were upset with Bolton during the impeachment proceedings, as well, saying he had even declined to produce an affidavit in the Senate trial for unclear reasons. Republicans pointed out that Democrats dropped their bid to compel testimony from Bolton, seemingly to push the proceedings along for political reasons -- an assessment that Bolton affirms in his book.

From the "very outset of the proceedings in the House of Representatives," Bolton writes, "advocates for impeaching Trump on the Ukraine issue were committing impeachment malpractice. They seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment in order to avoid interfering with the Democratic presidential nomination schedule than in completing a comprehensive investigation."

Had the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives not focused "solely" on Ukraine, Bolton wrote, they could have probed "the broader pattern of his behavior -- including his pressure campaigns involving Halkbank, ZTE, and Huawei among others."

Such an approach, Bolton muses, could have led to a "greater chance to persuade others that 'high crimes and misdemeanors' had been perpetrated. In fact, I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by re-election calculations."

Although Democrats fretted over his failure to testify, Bolton says, they were missing the forest for the trees.

"Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House's impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome," Bolton writes.

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Posted by Erin Burnett to Trang Ánh Nam at June 18, 2020 at 7:02 PM