Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics. Read more opinion LISTEN TO ARTICLE 3:55 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email

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As the House prepares to vote on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Wednesday, I’m going to take inspiration from Politico’s Jack Shafer and write angry. Not about Trump. Nor about the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Democrats or Republicans, House or Senate.

Nope. I’m going to write angry about John Bolton — and about everyone else who has relevant information about the president’s misconduct and has chosen to stay silent.

Bolton was the president’s national security adviser as the Ukraine scandal unfolded, when Trump was demanding that his Ukrainian counterpart dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden in return for special favors, such as a White House meeting and (allegedly) the release of promised military aid. Bolton certainly has pertinent information. He may even have a definitive answer to the question of which Ukraine story is accurate.

It’s possible that Bolton can confirm the Republican version, which is that Trump was keenly interested in fighting corruption in Ukraine and withheld the meeting and congressionally appropriated military funding to pressure its government to reform. Maybe Bolton heard Trump talk about Ukrainian corruption in private even though he never mentioned it publicly. Maybe he can explain why, in a crucial call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump talked only about Biden and an absurd conspiracy theory related to the 2016 election. If so, then Bolton is allowing impeachment to go forward despite knowing it’s based on flawed information.

Of course, it’s also possible — indeed, more likely — that Bolton can confirm the Democrats’ version: that Trump didn’t care about corruption at all but was instead abusing his office to smear a political opponent. If so, not only is Bolton allowing a guilty president to get away with it, but he’s helping someone willing to sell out the nation for private gain to remain in office.

Either way, he’s doing the country a grave disservice by staying silent.

And for what? Trump’s current staffers, at least, have their jobs on the line. They might also argue that they’re defending the president’s ability to run the executive branch as he sees fit. For former staffers, those rationales are far less compelling. Bolton isn’t bound by White House instructions not to testify; that’s his choice. For that matter, he’s not bound by Senator Mitch McConnell’s efforts to prevent testimony at Trump’s Senate trial. Bolton could give an interview today explaining exactly what he knows.

I’ve never shared Bolton’s foreign-policy views, but I’ve always thought that he was genuinely motivated by a desire to keep the nation safe and to promote what he saw as necessary national-security policies. I can’t see how his current silence, even while others similarly situated have divulged what they know, could possibly help achieve those goals.

It’s long past time for Bolton, and everyone else who has relevant information, to end the silence.

1. Matthew Green at Mischiefs of Faction on the role House leadership has played in the close-to-party-line vote for impeachment.

2. Yingyi Ma at the Monkey Cage on Chinese students studying abroad.

3. Perry Bacon Jr. on how Democrats and Republicans may be changing.

4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Karl Smith on the Cadillac tax.

5. And Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam with a fact-check of Trump’s letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I don’t link to fact-checkers too often, but Trump’s insistence on repeating things that aren’t true, even after they’ve been amply corrected, is on a different scale than that of any other president and is itself a serious violation of his oath of office. All politicians spin. But it undermines democracy when they tell flat-out untruths at such an alarming rate and with so little regard for established facts.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.