John Bolton is mentioned in two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, neither of which features him as a guest. In the first, he figures as a prospective witness whose testimony Senate Republicans were said to want to avoid during the 2020 impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. In the second, he is named among the figures from the Trump White House whom the economist Casey Mulligan describes in his book. The excerpts do not record Bolton speaking, do not state his title or position, and do not describe any action he took.
The impeachment trial and the question of witnesses
In a January 2020 episode on impeachment, the guest John Rothmann argued that the Senate trial was a political rather than a legal process. Within that argument, Bolton appears as a witness the president’s defenders did not want to hear. Rothmann said that Republicans did not want Mick Mulvaney to give testimony because Mulvaney’s statement in the White House briefing room — that of course it was a quid pro quo — would blow the lid off their defense. He then turned to Bolton: if John Bolton testifies, Rothmann said, and God knows what John Bolton would say, again it opens up a can of worms. The Republicans, in Rothmann’s account, wanted the matter behind them Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020).
The Bolton reference sits inside a broader exchange about what the president was accused of doing. Bob Zadek put a hypothetical to Rothmann: suppose Trump believed, rightly or wrongly, or was told by his advisors, that Joe Biden was sharing state secrets with Ukraine, and said out loud that he had to get to the bottom of it because Biden was a possible traitor and because he could get rid of a political opponent. Zadek asked whether Trump had committed an impeachable offense. Rothmann answered that the minute Biden’s name was mentioned, the door was opened for the president’s defenders to go after Biden on grounds of corruption, and he stressed that Biden was not on trial; what was on trial was that the president of the United States asked the leader of a foreign nation to investigate a potential political opponent while holding up aid appropriated by Congress. Rothmann called those facts indisputable and characterized the proceeding as political, noting that Republicans would have called for Barack Obama’s immediate removal had he done the same, and that Democrats had treated Bill Clinton the same way during the Lewinsky scandal — yes, he did it, but it doesn’t matter Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020).
Rothmann also said the president should have gone to the Attorney General and had an investigation initiated by the Justice Department, which he called the normal process, and that for a president to invite the president of a foreign nation who is dependent completely on the United States to dig up dirt on a political opponent was unconscionable. He said the president broke the law when he held up the aid in a quid pro quo, and cited Mulvaney’s briefing-room remark as evidence. He predicted the trial would be over within a week and that the president would be acquitted on a party-line vote, more or less, 53 to 47, with possibly a couple of Democrats in tough reelection battles voting to defend him. He cited polls showing 53% of Americans believed the president should be removed from office, and argued that a president running in a head-to-head contest could not win without the support of the American people. Bolton’s name appears in this episode only in the sentence about testimony and the can of worms it would open; the excerpt records no further statement about him, and the section that follows, on the withholding of aid and the GAO, breaks off after Bob Zadek says “Exactly” Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020).
Bolton among the White House figures in Mulligan’s account
In an August 2020 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Casey Mulligan, described as a University of Chicago professor who served as the Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers for a full year between 2018 and 2019, and who had published You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President, President Donald Trump. Zadek told listeners they would get first-hand views of larger-than-life figures who had been on the news almost every night, and named, besides the President, Peter Navarro, John Bolton, Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020).
That is the whole of Bolton’s presence in the episode as the excerpts preserve it. Zadek repeated the list later in the hour, describing the book’s treatment of Navarro and Bolton and Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush as fair, and saying the description of the players in Washington was unusual for a book of its type. The guest’s own remarks in the excerpts concern his first meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office, the small-group setup of those meetings, his comparison of Trump’s talents to watching Barry Sanders run against the Chicago Bears, and the contrast he drew with meeting Jeb Bush on the 2016 campaign trail. Mulligan did not, in the passages available, say anything about Bolton himself You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020).
Across episodes
Two episodes touch on John Bolton, and the excerpts show no development between them: in January 2020 he is a witness whose testimony Republicans were said to fear, and in August 2020 he is a name on a list of White House figures covered in a memoir. The earlier treatment is advanced by John Rothmann, the later by Bob Zadek in his introduction of Casey Mulligan; neither excerpt contains a statement by or about Bolton beyond those two uses.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Bolton’s title, his role in the administration, or any position he held, and they contain no interview with him or quotation from him. They do not say what he would have testified to, whether he testified, or what became of the question of witnesses in the trial. They do not describe his career before or after the events mentioned, and they do not record what Mulligan’s book says about him. Any account of Bolton’s own views or actions would have to come from sources outside these episodes.