Two Trump lawyers gave detailed accounts of the Hunter Biden scandal, in which the vice president's son was put on the board of Burisma at a salary of $81,000 a month, with no visible qualifications. The details of this sordid arrangement were not new. The transparent purpose of this presentation was to carry out, for a national television audience, the political assault on Biden that Trump had sought to induce the Ukrainian government to launch.
Even on the pro-Trump Fox network the efforts of his defense attorneys took second place to questions about the revelations by Bolton -- himself a right-wing pundit on Fox News before his appointment by Trump in 2018 to head the National Security Council (NSC).
There were furious attacks on Bolton in much of the ultra-right media that once lionized him. Breitbart News noted that he had submitted the draft manuscript to the National Security Council for review, and that the attorney in charge of such reviews was Yevgeny Vindman, twin brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the NSC official who testified before the impeachment inquiry about his objections to Trump's cutoff of aid to Ukraine. The strong suggestion was that Yevgeny Vindman had leaked the manuscript to the Times, but Vindman issued a statement denying any role in the review, which he said was performed by a different lawyer.
The White House and the NSC both declared that the manuscript had been reviewed only within the NSC. This suggests that the NSC did not alert Trump's legal team to the substance of the manuscript and the dangers it presented to Trump's defense -- an indication of the deep crisis within the American state, with warring factions literally under the same roof.
The Times, in an editorial published Monday night, gloated over the success of its carefully timed political bombshell directed against Trump. It wrote: "Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating. And his decision to tell these stories publicly nearly certainly waives any claims of executive privilege Mr. Trump might try to assert over their communications."
The editorial continued, "One reason good lawyers insist on deposing witnesses and subpoenaing documentary evidence is to avoid any unwelcome surprises at trial. Mr. Bolton has now provided the latest of those surprises. It is surely not the last."
With Trump seeking to whip up fascist violence against his opponents, and the Democrats and the bulk of the corporate media serving as front men and attorneys for powerful factions in the military-intelligence apparatus -- both sides equally hostile to the working class -- there is little doubt that the prediction of more surprises will be fulfilled.
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