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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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President Donald Trump is denying that he told former National Security Adviser John Bolton he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until the country launched investigations into Joe Biden and his son, allegations that Bolton levies in his new book, according to news reports.
But one of Trump’s former top aides told a Sarasota crowd Monday evening that if the reporting on what Bolton wrote is accurate, he believes Bolton.
“If John Bolton says that in the book I believe John Bolton,” said retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 18 months.
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Some Republican Senators, including potential swing voters like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), have raised concerns that a subpoena for John Bolton will trigger a claim of executive privilege by the White House and then lead to undesirable drawn out litigation. House managers have sought to downplay the length of any such dispute, noting perhaps too optimistically that Chief Justice Roberts could decide the issue right then and there.
They also argue that a court may not even entertain such a motion. Although the House Managers may prove to be right, we don’t address that here. What both sides ignore is a reason that the White House might never truly want to litigate the executive privilege question.
That’s because it could cause a federal court (or the Chief Justice) in short order to make the determination that the President committed a crime. Those advising the President would be wise to think hard before taking the actual step of asserting executive privilege to block the testimony of John Bolton or others.
As a threshold question, the judge will most probably look to whether an exception to executive privilege applies. The court could find that the privilege does not apply, for example, in those instances where the privilege has been waived by the President or his agents having spoken about the contents of the conversation.
But there is another threshold issue: if the proposed testimony involves evidence of criminal activity (more commonly understood as the “crime-fraud” exception in the context of attorney-client privilege).
As former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and his coauthors explained in a thorough analysis of executive privilege and its exceptions, “government officials cannot use constitutional privileges to hide evidence of crimes” (citing United States v. Nixon, United States v. Myers, Comm. on Judiciary, In Re Sealed Case).
WASHINGTON — It was late 2018, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was on the phone with an unusual request for President Trump: Could he intervene with top members of his cabinet to curb or even shut down a criminal investigation into Halkbank, one of Turkey’s largest state-owned banks?
It was not Mr. Erdogan’s only effort to persuade the Trump administration to back off the investigation into the bank, which had been accused of violating United States sanctions against Iran.
His government had hired a lobbying firm run by a friend of and fund-raiser for Mr. Trump to press his case with the White House and State Department. And there would be more phone calls between the two leaders in which the topic came up, according to participants in the lobbying.
Mr. Erdogan’s influence campaign is now under scrutiny again in Washington, following the disclosure that Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, reported in his forthcoming book his concern that the president was effectively granting personal favors to Mr. Erdogan and President Xi Jinping of China.
People familiar with the unpublished manuscript said Mr. Bolton wrote that he had shared his concern with Attorney General William P. Barr and that Mr. Barr responded by pointing to Mr. Trump’s intervention in two cases linked to Turkey and China: the investigation of Halkbank and Mr. Trump’s decision in 2018 to lift sanctions on ZTE, a major Chinese telecommunications company.
