Trump Lawyers Mull ‘Doomsday Plan’ To Hide Bolton Testimony

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Democrats continue to hope that former National Security Adviser John Bolton will testify during President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, and Bolton has said that he would testify if subpoenaed. But the Washington Post has reported that Trump’s allies (including Senate Republicans and Trump’s legal team) are so worried about the possibility of Bolton testifying before the U.S. Senate that according to a senior administration official, they are willing to turn possible Bolton testimony into classified material. And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow cited the Post’s report as evidence of how “freaked out” Trump’s allies are over possible Bolton testimony.

Trump’s allies, Maddow explained, are considering a “doomsday contingency plan” in which they would “move John Bolton’s testimony to a classified setting” because of “national security concerns, insuring that it is not public.”

Maddow commented, “Oh, so that’s what classification procedures are for: so you can call something a national security concern that must be classified because it might show the potential to incriminate the president at trial. Is that the national security you’re worried about? Is that what the classification process is for? That seems pretty desperate.”

Bolton, according to foreign affairs expert Fiona Hill, used the phrase “drug deal” to describe how he felt about Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to get the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. House Democrats believe that testimony from Bolton would do a lot to show that Trump committed impeachable offenses in his dealings with Ukraine.

Watch Maddow’s coverage of the report below, via MSNBC: