The Trump defense team did not bring up the new reporting about John Bolton today during the Senate impeachment trial, but Alan Dershowitz made a point of addressing it as he argued against impeaching President Donald Trump.
Bolton reportedly details in his upcoming book that the president connected holding up Ukraine aid to investigations he sought, and now there are growing calls for him to testify in the trial.
Dershowitz tonight reiterated the arguments he’s made before against impeaching Trump, especially on abuse of power. He said that “such a subjective probing of motives” of what was in the president’s mind is not sufficient basis for impeachment.
At one point he raised Bolton to say that a quid pro quo is “not a basis for abuse of power”:
“It’s part of the way foreign policy has been operated by presidents since the beginning of time. The claim that foreign policy decisions can be deemed as abuse of power based on subjective opinions based on mixed or sole motives, that the president was only interested in helping himself, demonstrate the dangers of a employing the vague, subjective, and politically malleable phrase abuse of power as a constitutionally permissible criteria for the removal of a president. It follows from this if a president, any president, were to have done what the Times reported about the content of the Bolton manuscript, that would-not constitute an impeachable offense. Let me repeat. Nothing in
the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”
You can watch above,