Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday defended former colleague John Bolton from attacks on his credibility ahead of his potential testimony in President Trump’s impeachment trial.
“I don’t like the idea of people making John Bolton out to be a liar,” Mr. Kilmeade said while co-hosting the latest episode of the “Fox & Friends” morning program.
“He’s sat on this couch before. He’s not a liar,” he said about Mr. Bolton.
Mr. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, served as a paid Fox News contributor for more than a decade before leaving the network to join the White House in 2018.
He parted ways with the Trump administration in September, and he subsequently wrote a yet-to-be-published book that recently caused senators to seek his testimony in the president’s trial.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Mr. Bolton wrote in the book that Mr. Trump told him he wanted to withhold aid from Ukraine until the country agreed to investigate Democratic rival Joseph R. Biden, which would make him intimately knowledgable about an allegation at the heart of the House of Representatives recently voting along party lines to impeach the president.
Democrats have accordingly pushed afterward for Mr. Bolton to testify in the president’s Senate trial, and a vote to consider making him a witness is expected to be held later this week.
Mr. Trump has lashed out at Mr. Bolton in the interim and denied the alleged conversation reported by The Times took place.
“I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” Mr. Trump said Monday on Twitter. “In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”
Mr. Trump’s defenders have similarly taken aim at his former adviser in the day since, including several Fox News personalities highly supportive of the president and his policies.
“Stop playing games,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said about Mr. Bolton while addressing him on his primetime show Wednesday. “This is not a game when it’s the presidency of the United States.”
More recently, Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs slammed Mr. Bolton during his own program Thursday, calling him a “turncoat” and “petty snarling Lilliputian.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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