Dear Commons Community,

Fox News’ Chris Wallace yesterday explained why President Donald Trump and his administration only have themselves to blame for the skepticism that’s engulfed their reasons for the recent escalation in military tensions with Iran.

Wallace told fellow Fox anchor Bret Baier that people “understandably” wanted to know what the “imminent” threat was that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo initially said prompted last Friday’s U.S. assassination of top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Trump has since stated in an interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham that Soleimani was planning an attack on four U.S. embassies, a claim that has also been met with much suspicion.

If the White House “had been a little more forthcoming right from the start, they might not have allowed this skepticism to build,” said Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” who is one of the few journalists on the conservative network who is willing to challenge the president on air.

“And look, to a certain degree, I think the president has himself to blame, because who has been more critical and less sort of just trusting on face of the intelligence agencies than Donald Trump over the last three years?” he continued. “So, you know, why shouldn’t we be skeptical too?”

Bernie Sanders on the same subject said he could not believe Trump and labeled him a “pathological liar.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nell Gluckman has an in-depth article in The Chronicle of Higher Education examining the problem of big money gifts and their influence in colleges and universities.  She questions the position of many administrators that “the money is taken for noble ends.” 

She reviews the complexity of the problem as:

“In the modern university, all sources of money, be they gifts from donors, corporate grants, or investments, can be tainted in some way. As one headline after another exposes unsavory billionaires and corrupt companies, students, faculty members, and alumni say their colleges’ sources of funding should reflect better values. They are demanding that universities take responsibility for their role in laundering wealthy philanthropists’ reputations and allowing outside influence on research…

…The intensity around this has amplified over the last nine months, starting with the Varsity Blues scandal, the Sacklers, and Jeffrey Epstein,” says Fritz W. Schroeder, the vice president for development and alumni relations at the Johns Hopkins University. “It is going to be with us for a period of time.”

So how should colleges recalibrate their standards? Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote a post on Medium defending Joi Ito, the former director of the MIT Media Lab, where Epstein directed money. Lessig said that he’d advised Ito to accept the gifts anonymously because it would prevent Epstein from using the MIT connection to burnish his reputation — something he was able to do anyway. In hindsight, Lessig said he was mistaken. The post was widely condemned.

Lessig laid out four different types of donors: Good people who earned their money in an innocuous way, good people who earned their money from companies whose ethics are “ambiguous,” criminal or immoral people who earned their money harmlessly, and people whose money comes from criminal or immoral means. 

The truth is, Lessig said, universities accept all four types. He proposed banning the third and the fourth types, but acknowledged that people will disagree about who fits into which category.”

In my opinion, colleges and universities should stay  away from all of these “pay-for-play” donors.  However, given the financial squeeze of so many of our institutions, it is easy to see the attractiveness of these gifts.

Tony

Dear Commons Community, 

A Ukrainian passenger jet carrying 176 people crashed on Wednesday, just minutes after taking off from Iran’s main airport in Teheran. At first, it was thought that mechanical failure was the cause.  However, it is “highly likely” that Iran shot down the civilian Ukrainian jetliner killing all on board, according to Canadian, U.S. and British officials.  They also said that the fiery missile strike could well have been a mistake amid rocket launches and high tension throughout the region. As reported by the Associated Press.

“The crash came just a few hours after Iran launched a ballistic attack against Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops in its violent confrontation with Washington over the U.S. drone strike that killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general. The airliner could have been mistaken for a threat, said four U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country lost at least 63 citizens in the downing, said in Ottawa: “We have intelligence from multiple sources including our allies and our own intelligence. The evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile.”

Likewise, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison offered similar statements. Morrison also said it appeared to be a mistake. “All of the intelligence as presented to us today does not suggest an intentional act,” he said.

The assessment that 176 people were killed as collateral damage in the Iranian-U.S. conflict cast a new pall over what had at first appeared to be a relatively calm aftermath following the U.S. military operation that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

It was not immediately clear how the U.S. and its allies would react. Despite efforts by Washington and Tehran to step back from the brink of possible war, the region remained on edge after the killing of the Iranian general and Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes. U.S. troops were on high-alert.

At the White House, President Donald Trump suggested he believed Iran was responsible for the shootdown and dismissed Iran’s initial claim that it was a mechanical issue with the plane.

“Somebody could have made a mistake on the other side.” Trump said, noting the plane was flying in a “pretty rough neighborhood.”

As for the airliner shootdown, the U.S. officials wouldn’t say what intelligence they had that pointed to an Iranian missile, believed to be fired by a Russian Tor system, known to NATO as the SA-15. But they acknowledged the existence of satellites and other sensors in the region, as well as the likelihood of communication interceptions and other similar intelligence.

A preliminary Iranian investigative report released Thursday said that the airliner pilots never made a radio call for help and that the aircraft was trying to turn back for the airport when the burning plane went down.

The Iranian report suggested that a sudden emergency struck the Boeing 737 operated by Ukrainian International Airlines when it crashed, just minutes after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.

Investigators from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization offered no immediate explanation for the disaster, however. Iranian officials initially blamed a technical malfunction for the crash, something backed by Ukrainian officials before they said they wouldn’t speculate amid an ongoing investigation.

Before the U.S. assessment, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Hasan Rezaeifa, the head of the of civil aviation accident investigation commission, claiming that “the topics of rocket, missile or anti-aircraft system is ruled out.”

The Ukrainian International Airlines took off at 6:12 a.m. Wednesday, Tehran time, after nearly an hour’s delay at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport, the main airport for travelers in Iran. It gained altitude heading west, reaching nearly 8,000 feet, according to both the report and flight-tracking data.

Then something went wrong, though “no radio messages were received from the pilot regarding unusual situations,” the report said. In emergencies, pilots reach out to air-traffic controllers to warn them and to clear the runway for their arrival, though their first priority is to keep the aircraft flying.

Eyewitnesses, including the crew of another flight passing above, described seeing the plane engulfed in flames before crashing at 6:18 a.m., the report said. The crash caused a massive explosion when the plane hit the ground, likely because the aircraft had been fully loaded with fuel for the flight to Kyiv, Ukraine.

The report also confirmed that both of the “black boxes” that contain data and cockpit communications from the plane had been recovered, though they sustained damage and some parts of their memory was lost.

Hours before the plane crash the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had issued an emergency flight restriction barring U.S. carriers and pilots from flying over areas of Iraqi, Iranian and some Persian Gulf airspace warning of the “potential for miscalculation or misidentification” for civilian aircraft due to heightened political and military tensions.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security Council, told Ukrainian media that officials had several working theories regarding the crash, including a missile strike.

“A strike by a missile, possibly a Tor missile system, is among the main (theories), as information has surfaced on the internet about elements of a missile being found near the site of the crash,” Danilov said.

Ukrainian investigators who arrived in Iran on Thursday awaited permission from Iranian authorities to examine the crash site and look for missile fragments, Danilov said.

The Tor is a Russian-made missile system. Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran in 2007, and Iran has displayed the missiles in military parades.

Iran did not immediately respond to the Ukrainian comments. However, Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, the spokesman of the Iranian armed forces, denied a missile hit the airplane in a comments reported Wednesday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. He dismissed the allegation as “psychological warfare” by foreign-based Iranian opposition groups.

Ukraine has a grim history with missile attacks, including in July 2014 when one such strike downed a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.

The plane was carrying 167 passengers and nine crew members from several countries, including 82 Iranians, at least 63 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians, according to officials. Many of the passengers were believed to be international students attending universities in Canada; they were making their way back to Toronto by way of Kyiv after visiting with family during the winter break.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, “Undoubtedly, the priority for Ukraine is to identify the causes of the plane crash. We will surely find out the truth.”

What a horrific loss of life and for nothing!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, I listened to President Trump’s response to Iran’s missile attacks on Iraq bases.  I thought his speech was all over the place and designed to say something for hawks and doves and everyone in between. David Sanger, a Pulitzer Prize winning international news correspondent in a piece for the New York Times, entitled, “Trump’s Iran Strategy: A Cease-Fire Wrapped in a Strategic Muddle,” is of a like mind.  Essentially, Sanger concludes that Mr. Trump has yet to resolve the two conflicting instincts on national security that emerge from his speeches and his Twitter feed: bellicosity and disengagement.  Here is an excerpt.

“The speech was, in many ways, the sound of muddled policy. It showed that after three years in office, Mr. Trump has yet to resolve the two conflicting instincts on national security that emerge from his speeches and his Twitter feed: bellicosity and disengagement.

And he included all the other requisite elements of a Trump policy speech on Iran: burning resentment of President Barack Obama, critiques of his predecessor’s nuclear deal, dubious factual claims and campaign-year self-congratulation.

Mr. Trump did pull back from the brink of war, at least for now. He made clear that he did not plan to respond to the missile attacks on two bases where American troops operate, which seemed calibrated by the Iranians to make a point without creating more human carnage.

But the president also promised to double down on sanctions against Iran, turning again to the economic tool he remained convinced would eventually force the country to choose between ruin and survival. Beyond saying the United States “is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,” he presented no path forward for the two adversaries of 40 years.

“It certainly sent mixed messages to Iran,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American strategist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr. Sadjadpour called the speech “initially triumphant” as Mr. Trump celebrated his order to kill the most famous military leader in Iran, a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops. “It was then dismissive toward Iran,” he said, “and then there was an almost throwaway line at the end about what a bright future the Iranians have if they only reshape themselves as the United States demands.”

..

Mr. Sadjadpour called the speech “strategically incoherent.” But that can be said about much of Mr. Trump’s Middle East policy in the past few months. The president pulled a small, fairly safe American force out of Syria that was primarily engaged in fighting the Islamic State with Syrian Kurdish allies, claiming it was time to halt “endless wars.” He decided not to respond when Iran first shot down an unmanned American drone and then executed a precision attack on Saudi oil facilities, leaving the impression inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that America’s Middle East ally was not worth defending.

And then, surprising everyone, including his own military advisers, he ordered the targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most important commander, saying that he was planning attacks on American targets, although the administration has offered few details.

Already that decision has led to a host of unintended consequences, including the sending of thousands more United States troops to the Middle East to defend American assets and interests that Mr. Trump only a few months ago suggested are not worth defending.

His answer to that contradiction seems to be to ask NATO to do the job. Presumably he wants allied forces to patrol the Persian Gulf at a time that tanker companies are halting their shipments across the Strait of Hormuz and airlines are avoiding Iraqi and Iranian airspace.”

Muddle is too kind a word for Trump’s strategy.  It is a mess!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Tangelo Park Program defines a new kind of philanthropy. Funding is not allocated in the conventional sense of “funding;” rather it  provides services when the community identifies its needs.

The Tangelo Park Program began as a result of a grass roots program that attracted attention from local government, civic groups, and Mr. Harris Rosen, a generous local hotelier. In 1993, after a successful effort to reclaim their neighborhood from urban blight and drug dealers, Tangelo Park community leaders met with Mr. Rosen and the Orange County School Board Superintendent to discuss the possibility of a college scholarship program for Tangelo residents; together they established the Tangelo Park Pilot Program.

Multiple programs that greatly enrich the Tangelo Park community have since developed from the original Pilot  Program. These programs include the 2-3-4-Year-Old Program, Rosen Foundation Scholarship, Family Service Center, Parent Leadership Training Program and Cornell University Alternative Spring Break. These programs provide Tangelo Park students with valuable education services and assist families in matters such as health care, counseling and parenting skills.

To find out more about this incredible program, you can listen to 30-minute podcast interview featuring Mr. Rosen and my colleague, Chuck  Dziuban from the University of Central Florida.  The interview was conducted by John Kane and  Rebecca Mushtare from SUNY Oswego as part of their Tea for Teaching Series.

Well worth a listen.  We need more Harris Rosens in our communities.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a featured article this morning highlighting the changes that have occurred  in our colleges and universities since the Great Recession.  The article focuses on the perceptions of individuals at a number of our institutions as they grapple with new fiscal and student demand realities. Here is an excerpt:

“During the past 10 years, the financial meltdown and its aftermath have spurred considerable change in how academic leaders run their institutions, public research universities in particular. Immediate funding shortfalls and tightened credit from banks squeezed many colleges, leading to furloughs and cutbacks.

The longer-term effects of the recession have been more profound and less obvious. They have altered campus revenue streams, influenced students’ choice of major, reshuffled the composition of the academic work force, and prodded colleges to emphasize their role as economic engines.

Institutions have had to prove their worth to both prospective students and skeptical state governments, many of which have reduced appropriations. Once prized as important societal investments, campuses have had to fend for themselves.

“Higher education in most parts of the country is moving from what is perceived as a public good, as economists would define the term, to a private good,” Morgan Olsen (ASU) said. “As that has happened, I think it has forced everyone to look at how they generate the resources.”

After taking short-term steps to stop the bleeding a decade ago, Olsen realized fairly quickly that the financial impact of the recession would endure.

Arizona’s state colleges and universities in 2017 received less than 40 percent of their revenue from educational appropriations, down from about 64 percent in 2007, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers.

This isn’t a temporary deviation from what was once normal, he remembers thinking. This is an inflection point.”

It you are interested in this issue, my colleague, Chet Jordan and I published a book earlier this year, The community college in the post-recession reform era:  Aims and outcomes of a decade of experimentation.  (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) that specifically focuses on large-scale policy changes at public community colleges as a result of the issues raised in the above article.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night, Iran fired a barrage of missiles at the al-Asad and Erbil military bases in Iraq that house American troops. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian armed forces, claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement to the press, saying it was carried out in the name of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States in a drone strike last week.

“The fierce revenge by the Revolutionary Guard has begun,” the IRGC said in a statement Wednesday, according to The New York Times.

The missiles were fired just hours after Soleimani’s body was returned to his hometown for burial. 

The Pentagon said it was still evaluating the damage from the strikes, noting the pair of bases had been on high alert after Iran’s threats. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper rushed to the White House shortly after the strikes began to meet with Trump.

The IRGC warned the U.S. and its allies not to retaliate further after the base attacks.

“We are warning all American allies, who gave their bases to its terrorist army, that any territory that is the starting point of aggressive acts against Iran will be targeted,” it said in a statement carried by Iran’s state-run news agency.

Iranian officials also said the strikes were meant to be a “proportionate” response to Soleimani’s death.

“We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, wrote on Twitter.

Tehran had pledged to respond in a “crushing and powerful manner” after Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, one of the most powerful military figures in the Middle East. Within days of that attack, the nation also ended its remaining commitments to limit nuclear fuel production as part of the Iran nuclear deal.

Trump had attempted to stave off any retaliation after Soleimani’s death, warning that the American military had identified 52 targets in Iran ― including cultural sites ― should Iran attack U.S. assets. Critics noted that targeting cultural sites would be a war crime in defiance of international law even as the president initially doubled down on his vows. (He walked back the remarks on Tuesday after the Pentagon said such targets were not on the table.)

The Associated Press noted that the al-Asad air base is a major outpost in Iraq’s Anbar province that was first used by U.S. troops after the 2003 invasion of that country to overthrow Saddam Hussein. American forces have been stationed there during the campaign against the self-described Islamic State.

More than 5,000 U.S. troops are currently in Iraq as part of that effort.

And so what is our next move, Mr. Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg’s column today in the New York Times entitled, “The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule is Here,” sadly but accurately describes where we have come in Trump’s disastrous reign as president.  Her subtitle, “Unstable and impeached, the president pushes the U.S. toward war with Iran,” reminds us that we have a president who for any reason can push our country into an unwanted and disastrous entanglement.

Her entire column is below.  Read it!

Tony

 ———————————————————————————–

The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule Is Here!

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Jan. 6, 2020

There are no more adults in the room.

After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

We don’t yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error.) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation.

The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but “a normal Monday in the Middle East,” and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration’s case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the “Iranian menace” — has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.

Rather than self-defense, the Suleimani killing seems like the dreadful result of several intersecting dynamics. There’s the influence of rapture-mad Iran hawks like Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Defense officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. According to Peter Bergen’s book “Trump and His Generals,” James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. But with Mattis gone, military officials, The Times reported, presented Trump with the possibility of killing Suleimani as the “most extreme” option on a menu of choices, and were “flabbergasted” when he picked it.

Trump likely had mixed motives. He was reportedly upset over TV images of militia supporters storming the American Embassy in Iraq. According to The Post, he also was frustrated by “negative coverage” of his decision last year to order and then call off strikes on Iran.

Beyond that, Trump, now impeached and facing trial in the Senate, has laid out his rationale over years of tweets. The president is a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave. He told us, over and over again, that he believed Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to “save face” and because his “poll numbers are in a tailspin” and he needed to “get re-elected.” To Trump, a wag-the-dog war with Iran evidently seemed like a natural move for a president in trouble.

It’s hard to see how this ends without disaster. Defenders of Trump’s move have suggested that he might have re-established deterrence against Iran, frightening its leadership into restraint. But Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former senior adviser to Obama’s State Department, tells me that Iran likely believes that it has to re-establish deterrence against the United States.

“If they don’t do anything, or if they don’t do enough, then Trump will get comfortable with this kind of behavior, and that worries them,” said Nasr. To Iranians, after all, America is the aggressor, scrapping a nuclear agreement that they were abiding by and imposing a punishing “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. Just like militarists in the United States, they’re likely to assume that weakness invites attacks. “I don’t think they want to provoke war, but they do want to send a signal that they’re prepared for it,” said Nasr.

Even if Iran were to somehow decide not to strike back at the United States, it’s still ramping up its nuclear program, and Trump has obliterated the possibility of a return to negotiations. “His maximum pressure policy has failed,” Nasr said of Trump. “He has only produced a more dangerous Iran.”

Meanwhile, ISIS benefits from the breach between Iraq and America. “ISIS suicide and vehicle bombings have nearly stopped entirely,” said Brett McGurk, who until 2018 was special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. “Only a few years ago, there were 50 per month, killing scores of Iraqis. That’s because of what we have done and continue to do. These networks will regenerate rapidly if we are forced to leave, and they will again turn their attention on the West.”

Unlike with North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.

Dear Commons Community,

Facebook announced yesterday that it would ban videos that are heavily manipulated by artificial intelligence, known as deepfakes, from its platform.  A Facebook executive said that the social network would remove videos altered by artificial intelligence in ways that “would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say.”  Deepfake is an AI-based technology used to produce or alter video content so that it presents something that didn’t, in fact, occur. The term is named for a Reddit user known as deepfakes who, in December 2017, used deep learning technology to edit the faces of celebrities onto people in pornographic video clips. The term, which applies to both the technologies and the videos created with it, is a linguistic blending of deep learning and fake.

The policy will not extend to parody or satire, the executive, Monika Bickert, said, nor will it apply to videos edited to omit or change the order of words.

Ms. Bickert said all videos posted would still be subject to Facebook’s system for fact-checking potentially deceptive content. And content that is found to be factually incorrect appear less prominently on the site’s news feed and is labeled false.  As  reported by The Washington Post.

“Facebook was heavily criticized last year for refusing to take down an altered video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been edited to make it appear as though she was slurring her words. At the time, the company defended its decision, saying it had subjected the video to its fact-checking process and had reduced its reach on the social network.

It did not appear that the new policy would have changed the company’s handling of the video with Ms. Pelosi.

The announcement comes ahead of a hearing before the House Energy & Commerce Committee on tomorrow, during which Ms. Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, is expected to testify on “manipulation and deception in the digital age,” alongside other experts.

Because Facebook is still the No. 1 platform for sharing false political stories, according to disinformation researchers, the urgency to spot and halt novel forms of digital manipulation before they spread is paramount.

Computer scientists have long warned that new techniques used by machines to generate images and sounds that are indistinguishable from the real thing can vastly increase the volume of false and misleading information online. And false political information is circulating rapidly online ahead of the 2020 presidential elections in the United States.

In late December, Facebook announced it had removed hundreds of accounts, including pages, groups and Instagram feeds, meant to fool users in the United States and Vietnam with fake profile photos generated with the help of artificial intelligence.”

This is a good step for Facebook but as AI technology improves, it will be a very difficult policy to implement. AI is rapidly reaching a point where we cannot distinguish what is real and what is unreal.

Tony

John Bolton

Dear Commons Community,

Former national security adviser John Bolton said this morning that he is willing to testify before the Senate in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial if he is subpoenaed.

“I have concluded that, if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify,” Bolton said in a statement.

Bolton’s agreement to testify if subpoenaed, however, doesn’t necessarily mean the Senate will actually hear from him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are currently trying to work out an agreement on what the rules will be for an impeachment trial.

The Democratic position is that calling witnesses is essential to a fair process, and Schumer has specifically requested the testimony of four people who did not testify before the House ― including Bolton. But McConnell hasn’t agreed to subpoenaing witnesses or additional documents that shed light on the Ukraine scandal and what role Trump specifically played in pressuring the country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family. 

House Democrats decided not to subpoena Bolton while the chamber mulled over whether to draft impeachment articles last year. They reached the decision after the White House declared it wouldn’t cooperate with the hearings and instructed top officials who’d already been subpoenaed not to comply.

As a result, numerous top officials familiar with Trump’s thinking — including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, White House attorney and legal adviser to the National Security Council John Eisenberg, and former Energy Secretary Rick Perry ― have remained silent. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has so far refused to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate, meaning McConnell has not been able to start the trial. 

If Bolton genuinely wants to all the information he has about Trump’s conduct, there are ways he could do so without waiting for a subpoena, such as talking to Congress voluntarily or even giving an interview to the press. 

Bolton’s statement also does not indicate whether his testimony will support or refute the impeachment allegations.  He has been a loyal, long-time Republican Party official for decades.  He also left the Trump’s administration last year because of serious disagreements over foreign policy.

Bolton’s statement(s) and actions will be followed closely during future impeachment proceedings.

Tony