Fox News host Chris Wallace said on Monday during his network’s coverage of President Donald Trump’s impeachment that the president’s supporters were “spinning like crazy” over former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s upcoming book.
According to Wallace, the “spinning like crazy” aspect suggested the news was significant.
Wallace said, “If you want a sense of how big the news is that we’ve heard in the last twelve hours, fourteen hours, just listen to the Trump supporters, frankly, like Congressman Lee Zeldin and a lot of others spinning like crazy that it isn’t big news, and you get a sense that this is really an important development in this case.”
He continued, “Let’s put it in the context of where we were or thought we were going to be this morning, and that is that it appeared that the drive to call witnesses in the Senate had basically petered out, it wasn’t going to happen, that you were going to have the defense lawyers for the president present their case over the next today and possibly tomorrow. We were going to have the hours of question and answer, and then there was going to be a vote on witnesses that was going to fail, and the president was going to be acquitted. There was a lot of talk that this trial was going to be over by Friday. That may still happen, but it seems to me it’s much, much less likely because the main argument that the defense has made is there’s no first-hand evidence that the president specifically conditioned support for Ukraine on political investigations of the Democrats and of Joe Biden. And here you have, according to the New York Times report, the transcript of one of the people and the name of his book is In the Room Where it Happened, of course, the line from the Hamilton musical, one of the guys in the room former national security adviser John Bolton saying, ‘No, President Trump told me directly no aid released until Ukraine began those investigations.'”
Wallace added, “It seems to me that it’s going to be awfully hard for those Republican senators in the middle, maybe even more senators than that, to now vote against witnesses. And I can tell you one other factor here. I suspect that you’re going to find there are a lot of Republicans in that Senate lunch which is happening right now who are furious with the White House, saying, ‘Why didn’t you give us a heads up on this? We were no witnesses, there’s nothing to see here, and you knew because the transcript was submitted some time ago. You knew that he was going to basically incriminate you, so you’ve put egg on our faces.'”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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