Top Democrat: Bolton urged me to look into Trump’s ouster of Yovanovitch
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel said Bolton “strongly implied” something improper had occurred.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel (D-NY) made a stunning disclosure on Wednesday: “President Trump is wrong that John Bolton didn’t say anything about the Trump-Ukraine Scandal at the time the President fired him. He said something to me.”
According to Engel, during a private phone conversation in late September, shortly after Bolton was fired, Bolton told him — “unprompted” — that the House Foreign Affairs Committee should look into the ouster of US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
“He strongly implied that something improper had occurred around her removal as our top diplomat in Kyiv,” Engel said in his statement.
At that point, the House had already begun its inquiry into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, which encompassed the right-wing smear campaign against Yovanovitch.
Engel was responding Wednesday to a Trump tweet in which the president questioned Bolton’s assertions in his forthcoming book that Trump told him directly that he had held up aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the Bidens.
“Why didn’t John Bolton complain about this ‘nonsense’ a long time ago, when he was very publicly terminated. He said, not that it matters, NOTHING!” Trump tweeted.
Engel said he’d declined to make public his conversation with Bolton at the time, but he did share details with his House counterparts leading the investigation into the Ukraine scandal.
“It was one of the reasons we wished to hear from Ambassador Bolton, under oath, in a formal setting,” Engel said.
