AUSTIN — While most of the political world was looking for John Bolton on Thursday and wondering if he will be forced to testify before the U.S. Senate in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, the former national security adviser was more than 1,500 miles away in Texas.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be in Austin,” Bolton said to laughter at a lunchtime speaking engagement in a hotel ballroom, during which he gave little mention to the political whirlwind surrounding him.

Bolton acknowledged that he doesn’t know what will happen when he returns to Washington but said he’s keeping his schedule open.

“I don’t know what we are doing tomorrow,” he said.

Kidding aside, Bolton, who has become a central figure in Trump’s impeachment trial this week, made clear to a room full of financial investment experts that they shouldn’t expect him to dish new details about the impeachment effort.

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“For reasons that I’m sure you can understand, I’m not going to get into a lot of that,” said Bolton, whose appearance was sponsored by Luther King Capital Management, an investment management services company.

In a leaked manuscript of a book that Bolton’s working on, according to the New York Times, he offers potential evidence that Trump wanted to continue freezing military and security aid to Ukraine until government officials there agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s family and its role with a state-run natural gas company.

Since the report in the Times, Democrats have spent days calling on the Senate to allow Bolton and other witnesses to testify in the trial. But Democrats need the votes of four Republicans to get more witness testimony in the case, and they have so far been unable to clear that hurdle.

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Republicans meanwhile have largely been unified in opposing testimony from new witnesses, including Bolton. Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow, speaking to the Senate, brushed off the importance of Bolton’s potential testimony, saying the furor over it is coming from reporters who have “an idea of maybe what it says.”

“If you want to call that evidence — I don’t know what you’d call that — I’d call it inadmissible,” he said.

Sekulow went on to say that impeachment is “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts.”

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In Austin, Bolton focused his speech on events around the world and how they might affect the U.S. economy. He talked about China’s rising role in the world, Russia’s aggression and North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.