Adam Schiff suggested on a Sunday show that his committee will look into calling John Bolton as a witness.
The only way I can see him doing that is if he does it exactly like his previous impeachment probe.
Republicans would not be allowed to call any witnesses whatsoever.
The Democrats would not want a couple of dozen people on national television calling Bolton an unmitigated liar.
That would be a real mood killer. And his contention about a new impeachment trial, I believe, is just static.
This close to the election, I don’t think even the Democrats are so insane that they would take a chance on pushing Americans into feeling sympathy with the president.
The upside just isn’t there with such an unreliable witness.
The whistleblower was unreliable too, and notice they would not allow him to testify.
NBC News anchor Chuck Todd asked:
“If you don’t act now, and you sort of wait to act and you wait to see what happens in November, is that too late? If you believe he has done impeachable acts with the Chinese government, can you really wait until after the election to put Bolton under oath, to start the process?”
“I don’t think we should wait, if we conclude that there are important things he says that needs to be exposed to the public,” Schiff responded. Specifically, Schiff asserted that “those comments that the president made when only the interpreter and President Xi [Jinping] was in the room, blessing the concentration camps of the Uighurs, it’s exactly why we want to know what he said to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin when he’s alone in the room with Putin.”
That was a reference to a paragraph in Bolton’s book, which White House officials call a fabrication: “At the opening dinner of the Osaka G20 meeting, with only interpreters present, Xi explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do. [The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer Matthew] Pottinger told me Trump said something very similar during the 2017 trip to China, which meant we could cross repression of the Uighurs off our list of possible reasons to sanction China, at least as long as trade negotiations continued.”
