adviser john bolton got the call to testify and just before air time his lawyers told cnn he would not appear without a subpoena. and tim morrison announced he will be leaving his job soon. he was on the july 25th call with ukraine s president. take alone any one of these items is significant. taken together, they all speak to what the president said today he apparently wants to talk about. quoting from his tweet, republicans, yes, that s how he spelled it, go with substance and close it out. in a sense, republicans have not been talking substance. they ve been crashing hearings that many of them were entitled to be at anyway, ordering pizza and arguing process or avoiding questions about the evidence so far or the central question, do they believe it s right or wrong for a president to demand, in his official capacity on the global staigs stage, political
there is certainly no law that says you can t impeach a president unless you find a quid pro quo. that s up to congress. john dean, we don t know what bolton would testify to. we re not there s no way of knowing exactly, other than reports that he had described some of giuliani s stuff as a drug deal. do you think bolton is looking for legal or political cover by his attorneys insisting there be a subpoena in order for him to testimony testif testify? i think he s probably looking for some political cover here, where he didn t voluntary walk in, and he can keep his credentials with the republican establishment that he wasn t necessarily a voluntary witness. a subpoena would resolve that issue for him. as to the scope of his testimony, anderson, what he can do is very unique. he can place this in an overall context of the national security council s policy and positions
know, that seems to have worked for them thus far. sorry, jen. very quickly. i was just going to add, there s another factor with bolton. he has long been an advocate for military assistance to ukraine. he has a huge policy bone to pick here. a lot of fellow republicans who have long been advocates of that as well. i m not saying that s the only factor but that s probably in his mind, too. we ll see. we have to take a quick break. new details on exactly what happened july 10th in the white house that led to john bolton reportedly likening it to a drug deal. later the president s attack on lieutenant colonel vindman. with advil, you have power over pain, so the whole world looks different.
and his disquiet as to what was happening. there is another issue as to bolton. there could be a legitimate claim of executive privilege for some of his interactions with the president. i mean, we often talk about executive privilege, and the court has never precisely defined what s covered but interactions between the president s top foreign policy adviser and the president about foreign policy, you could see a court saying, you know what? if the president doesn t want that disclosed i, judge, am not going to disclose it. jeff, do you think he might not then testify at all, even if he was given a subpoena? see, i don t think executive privilege is always defined narrowly. certainly his conversations with the other aides, not the president, i don t think there s any way those would be covered by executive privilege. i can t imagine a blanket prohibition on his testimony. but there could be some questions where there would be a
washington. as of late this evening, his attorney says he will not testify without a subpoena. unclear of whether he will fight a subpoena if it comes. jen psaki, john dean and jeff toobin. it is starting, especially given ambassador sondland s testimony. he has either seemed to have forgotten about a lot of things that occurred. there was a bunch of stuff he said he didn t remember, or he was flat out not telling the truth. someone here is not being accurate. right. and clearly at this point, it appears that ambassador sondland is on one side of this in terms of his story line and everybody else who has testified is on the other. and it just so happens that ambassador sondland is a trump supporter, donor to the president and that s how he got the job of ambassador. he s not actually a career diplomat. that s true. foreign service officers, career diplomats and we re seeing this with bill taylor, they take