House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggested on Sunday that former national security adviser John Bolton may soon testify before his panel – and that a fresh new round of impeachment proceedings may result from the memoir, Fox News reported.
Schiff, D-Calif., made the remarks as Bolton, appearing on a separate talk show, charged that the Schiff-lead impeachment proceedings earlier this year were “too politicized” to bother with.
The back-and-forth came days after a federal judge determined that Bolton’s decision to publish his upcoming tell-all memoir on the Trump administration had “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability,” and that Bolton had “likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”
Schiff said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that although he hasn’t read Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” his committee would be looking in coming days at having Bolton testify.
“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?” NBC News anchor Chuck Todd asked. “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.”
Schiff told Todd that the country is again in imminent danger. Just months ago, Schiff similarly warned that unless Trump were removed from office, Russians might invade the U.S. mainland.
“Exposure of this president’s conduct is the best way to protect this country,” Schiff said, adding that the President was “dealing away national security … in order to help himself.”
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