President Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr first learned less than two weeks ago that their chosen replacement for the Manhattan U.S. attorney wanted the job, that person told Congress on Thursday.

Jay Clayton––currently the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)––made the revelation in a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, while fielding questions from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).

Late in the evening on Friday, June 19, Barr announced that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoff Berman, was stepping down, and that Trump would nominate Clayton to replace him. Berman, however, said he had no plans to step down, kicking off a dramatic intra-DOJ stand-off that ended Saturday afternoon.

“When did you first discuss the Southern District job with the president, or the Trump administration, and who did you discuss it with?” Maloney asked. “Attorney General Barr?”

“Look, I’m here as the chairman of the SEC to discuss the work of the SEC,” he replied. “What I can say is that, as I said in my opening statement, I need to go back to New York.”

“I was just asking for a timeline,” Maloney replied. “When did you discuss it? Just give me the approximate date, the timeline.”

“What I want to say is, this is something I’ve been talking about for a while, consulting with people as to whether this would make sense for me to continue in public service,” Clayton continued. “This was first raised to the president and the attorney general last weekend. It was something that I had wanted to do, and they first became aware of it last weekend.”

“Thank you, and did you know that Mr. Berman did not want to leave his job in the Southern District when you agreed to accept the nomination?” she asked. “In other words, did you know he was going to be fired to make room for you, instead, for the job?”

“I’m not going to get into that here,” he replied.

Clayton’s statement appeared to indicate that within hours of his expressing interest in the job, Barr moved to fire the person who held it at the time––a remarkably quick decision-making process. A spokesperson for the SEC did not immediately respond to a request for more clarification of Clayton’s statement. Later in the hearing, after Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) asked him to clarify, he said he actually had “the initial conversation” with Barr and Trump over the weekend of June 12.

“This was entirely my idea,” he said. “This was something that I’d been thinking about for several months as a possible continuation of public service after my time at the SEC is done.”

Clayton golfed with Trump on Saturday, June 13, according to The New York Times, raising the question of whether he discussed the Southern District posting directly with the president on that occasion.

In his exchange with Maloney, Clayton also addressed a question about whether or not he would recuse himself from matters involving Trump and his allies.

“If you are eventually confirmed by the Senate for this job, would you commit to recusing yourself from all of that office’s current investigation into President Trump and his associates?” she asked.

“Here’s what I’m gonna say,” he replied. “That’s a process that’s way down the road. Whatever my current position or any position I take, I commit to doing it independently, without fear or favor, in the pursuit of justice.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not what I was asking,” Maloney shot back, going on to detail why she was pressing him on it.

“I’m asking you a very simple question,” she said. “Will you commit, right here, to recusing yourself from these investigations?”

“That position and that process is something that is separate and doesn’t need my attention. What I will commit to do, what I commit to do in my current job, is to approach the job with independence and to follow all ethical rules.”

Maloney said he still wasn’t answering the question, and said the American people need to know whether or not he will be independent.

“Understood, and I commit to independence,” he replied.

The circumstances of Berman’s ouster generated furor among congressional Democrats and critics of Trump’s DOJ. And it still isn’t clear why Barr fired him so quickly, as he could have stayed in the position until the Senate confirmed Clayton as his replacement.

Some even called for Barr’s impeachment in the wake of the move. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi batted down that talk in an interview with The Washington Post on Thursday.

“At this point, let’s solve our problems by going to the polls and voting on election day,” she said.

Congressional Republicans have largely rejected what John Bolton has to say in his newly released memoir about his time working for Donald Trump. What’s less clear is whether they’ll reject Bolton’s money.Bolton, the ultra-hawkish former national security adviser to Trump, is a longtime fixture in Republican politics, and for years he’s used a personal political action committee to direct campaign money to politicians whose values align with his own. Since the 2014 election cycle, Bolton’s PAC has doled out $1.6 million to a number of sitting GOP lawmakers. Two out of every five current GOP senators have cashed a check from Bolton at some point in the last six years, and dozens of U.S. House members, former lawmakers, and candidates have, too. For the 2020 election, Bolton has backed three GOP senators up for re-election—Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Thom Tillis (R-NC)—as well as two House members, Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Lee Zeldin (R-NY). Each has received the maximum $10,000 contribution from his PAC.In addition to those contributions, Bolton’s sister super PAC ran a handful of Facebook ads in late 2019, seemingly designed to build up its voter contact list with petitions to “defend Ambassador John Bolton” from “the radicalized liberal Left.” But both the PAC and super PAC have remained largely dormant so far this year.If Bolton decides to reactivate his political operation, though, it will have a significant war chest at its disposal. All told, the PAC and super PAC are still sitting on roughly $2.5 million in cash, largely raised during previous election cycles. Bolton’s plans for the two groups and the substantial sums they still command aren’t yet clear. A spokesperson for the PACs did not respond to questions about their activities going forward.Bolton Says Jared Kushner Was the Most Important Person in the White HouseWhen Bolton’s book dropped and alleged that Trump had, among other things, attempted to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win re-election by buying U.S. exports from farm states, Tillis told reporters that he agreed with the blistering response from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who said Bolton was “unpatriotic” for putting his testimony in a book instead of under oath during Trump’s impeachment trial. “I got a long reading list ahead of me, and it’s not going to go to the top of the stack,” Tillis said of Bolton’s book. Cotton, meanwhile, said on Fox News that he found Bolton’s claims to be “simply implausible.”All five of Bolton’s current endorsees for this election cycle were contacted by The Daily Beast; none indicated they’d return Bolton’s money. Asked directly on Capitol Hill if he’d considered returning Bolton’s contributions, Cotton declined to comment. A spokesman for his campaign later told The Daily Beast in an email, “We’re keeping the contribution and will be using it to run ads against Joe Biden for his failure to stand up to the woke liberal mob.”The apparent reluctance among Republican politicians to cut all ties with Bolton, especially supportive ones, may speak to the power of lingering good feelings toward the GOP stalwart, even as he derides the leader of their party as unfit for the presidency. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who took $10,000 from Bolton’s PAC in 2016, said he’d take a check from him again. “He's been a valued adviser on foreign policy for a long time and he's helped a lot of Republicans running for office,” Blunt told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “He established a PAC just to do that. And I suspect that will continue to be the case. “Per federal campaign finance records, however, Bolton’s PAC has been quiet since Sept. 23, 2019, two weeks after he left the White House on poor terms with the president. On that day, the PAC dropped $50,000 to support its five initial endorsees for 2020, but no disbursements have been made since. As recently as May 2020, the PAC has continued to spend money on overhead such as fundraising expenses, rent, and payroll. Bolton’s super PAC has been spending money on similar things through March, though it has not directed any money toward ads or other communication yet for the 2020 cycle.If holding onto Bolton’s money hasn’t proven thorny for the Republicans who already have it, it’s unclear what might happen if he decides to spread the wealth to more candidates, just as he has in the last three election cycles.In particular, several of the candidates Bolton has supported in the past find themselves in tough elections in which some extra dollars would be welcome—but Bolton’s imprimatur might not. Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ), for example, has long been one of Bolton’s favorites. His PAC has given $35,000 to her campaigns since 2014—that year, her successful bid to unseat a Democratic House incumbent was actually the first that Bolton’s PAC officially endorsed. McSally, a former fighter pilot and a strident hawk, has previously been effusive in her praise for the former national security adviser, calling Bolton a “true patriot” in 2018.But McSally, who’s seriously at risk of losing the seat she was appointed to after Sen. John McCain’s death, has hugged Trump closely. Her campaign did not respond to a question from The Daily Beast about whether she’d return any of Bolton’s money or welcome it again in the future.Tillis, whose re-election battle in North Carolina could be among the hardest-fought in the country, has received $20,000 from Bolton over the years. In 2014, Bolton’s super PAC spent $1.3 million on ads boosting Tillis’ first successful bid for Senate. Two other top Democratic targets, Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Steve Daines (R-MT), also received Bolton contributions during their 2014 campaigns. Another current Bolton-supported candidate, Zeldin, is a marginal Democratic target in the House but maintains close ties with Trump and Trumpworld. He was a vocal defender of the president during the impeachment inquiry, and traveled with Trump on Air Force One to his recent rally in Oklahoma. A frequent tweeter, Zeldin has not mentioned Bolton’s allegations since they were revealed on June 17. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

It would be hard for any attorney general to withstand a deputy attorney general of the same party calling him “the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law.” It would be harder still to withstand congressional testimony from two serving Justice Department prosecutors about his subordination of justice to the wishes of the president. But Bill Barr had a fantastic day in Congress on Wednesday. That’s not because either official, antitrust prosecutor John Elias and ex-Roger Stone prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, had their stories unravel. It’s because Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee stood enthusiastically behind Barr. And it’s also because Democrats offered little beyond harsh invective, thanks to a deep reluctance amongst their own leadership to get into another impeachment fight. When Elias and Zelinsky testified about inappropriate antitrust investigations or leniency shown to convicted friends of the president, panel Republicans applauded the attorney general as the slayer of a Deep State out to entrap Donald Trump. Either that, or they went after Elias, Zelinsky, or former George H.W. Bush Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, who went far further in lambasting Barr as a kind of anti-constitutional officer.   Bill Barr Gives House Dems an Extended Middle Finger and They’re Not Quite Sure How to React“Bill Barr is trying to do the Lord’s work to clean it up, so it doesn’t happen again,” intoned Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the senior GOPer on the panel, after again portraying the 2016-19 investigations of Trump as a witch hunt by Obama cronies. Jordan set the tone. Barr, with his “exemplary record,” was “restoring integrity” within the department, said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH). The hearing was a “farce,” said Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), with Democrats knifing Barr for “trying to clean up and clear up messes made by the previous administration.” Most ominously, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) told the three witnesses that “history will not judge you kindly in the days ahead… whether we get to continue this experiment in self-government or not.” A spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether Gohmert believes the American republic is in danger of collapse.It was the most foursquare defense of Barr from Hill Republicans yet. Their support for Trump, post-Russiagate and post-impeachment, is compulsory at this point. But on Wednesday, they went beyond allegiance to Trump to affirmatively portray Barr as the one out to drain the swamp. They did so days after perhaps the lowest point in Barr’s brief tenure. On Friday, Barr lied that the U.S. attorney in New York had resigned, prompting a weekend standoff over ousting Geoffrey Berman before Barr partially backed down. It remains unclear if Barr will himself testify before the House committee, but he knows he has a GOP firewall if he does. Against all that, Democrats had rhetoric. Their leadership doesn’t want to impeach Barr. Their caucus is internally divided on what to do about him. Their response, which frequently overshadowed their focus on the substance of Elias and Zelinsky’s testimony, was to hurl invective at Barr. Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called him Trump’s “fixer.” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called the politicization of the Justice Department “worse than Watergate, worse than Nixon.” Referring to Barr’s violent suppression of the June 1 protest in Lafayette Square, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) said that to the attorney general, friends of the president get pardons and reduced jail time, but “if you’re peacefully protesting brutality, you get tear-gassed.”But despite their portrayal of Barr as a legal vandal, only one of them advocated removing him from office. “We should pursue impeachment of Bill Barr,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), “because he’s raining terror on the rule of law.” Amidst the rhetoric, Justice Department prosecutors Zelinsky and Elias occasionally got to testify. Elias, from the antitrust division, told the panel that his office was pressured to pursue cannabis-firm mergers, sometimes not among competitors, because Barr finds marijuana disreputable. He further recounted political appointees atop the division pressing them to investigate California’s auto emissions deal with car manufacturers after Trump tweeted negatively about “California regulators.” Bill Barr Has Pie on His Face, and One More Trick Up His Sleeve With John Durham’s October SurpriseZelinsky, far more famously, was a prosecutor for Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Mueller who successfully convicted Trump consigliere Stone before a Barr ally intervened to give the president’s friend a lenient sentencing recommendation. Both Zelinsky and Elias opened themselves up to career reprisal by testifying, as the impeachment aftermath showed Trump purging the administration of numerous meddlesome witnesses and inspectors-general. Republicans were not interested in their testimony. They attempted derailing the hearing because Zelinsky testified remotely—something he explained was to protect his newborn baby from COVID-19. Later, they figured having one of Mueller’s “merry band of Never Trumpers,” in Pennsylvania Republican Guy Reschenthaler’s phrase, was a good opportunity to go after Russiagate. Zelinsky instead batted away questions by pleading that the Justice Department had restricted him from testifying about anything about Mueller beyond his 2019 findings. Jordan reprised an impeachment tactic by saying that because Zelinsky hadn’t talked to Barr, he had no basis to say that there was anything political about the Justice Department overruling his team of career prosecutors to go easy on Stone. (Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida even went to the extent of predicting, “Roger Stone will be pardoned.”) Elias they portrayed as a Democratic hack for being detailed to the Obama White House and seeking an early 2019 assignment to House Democrats, which they claimed was enthusiasm for impeaching Trump.    Donald Ayer, who preceded Barr as deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, didn’t have any inside knowledge about Barr’s attorney generalship. Instead, Ayer urged the committee “to distrust everything he says,” from his actions to suppress anti-white supremacy protests to the “Obamagate nonsense that’s being spewed by the president” and laundered into John Durham’s inquiry into the origins of Russiagate. With Barr publicly describing Durham’s ongoing investigation—to the point of the attorney general hinting at prosecutions to come—“no one is in a position to say he’s wrong, but he’s wrong,” Ayer said.“Frankly,” Ayer continued, “my worry is he’s going to do it more and more in the weeks and months ahead as we get closer to the election.” With Republicans lining up behind Barr and Democrats confused about what they’ll do, Ayer’s worries are unlikely to abate. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

For a while, at least, it seemed The View didn’t quite know what to do with John Bolton. Under questioning from Joy Behar, the former national security advisor deftly evaded a commitment to testify to Congress if subpoenaed ahead of the 2020 election. A question from Meghan McCain about his Broadway-inspired book title was even more useless. “Do you understand that it’s insulting to those of that are fans of Hamilton to co-opt art from Lin-Manuel Miranda for your own political purposes?” she asked, nonsensically. But the hosts did eventually find their footing late in the interview when it came to Bolton’s refusal to voluntarily share his damning information about President Trump during the impeachment trial—instead of holding onto it for his book. Stacey Abrams Repeatedly Shuts Down Meghan McCain on ‘The View’After Sunny Hostin confirmed with Bolton that he knew Trump tried to get dirt on Joe Biden’s family in exchange for unfreezing aid to Ukraine, Whoopi Goldberg said, “So this is information that you didn’t share with Congress, but you knew all of the hoops everyone was jumping through. You knew the impeachment trial was being set up to fail. You say that the Democrats committed impeachment malpractice, but I think everyone who was in power there did this.”“Everyone did this to the American people, and you knew!” she continued. “I want to believe that the great American that you are thought of knew this was going on and wanted to do something and just felt that your hands were tied. Because if you knew all this was happening, why didn't you step up and say, I don’t care, this is not how America is supposed to be. Why didn’t you step up?!” In response, Bolton avoided the question by highlighting the actions he took when he was still part of the Trump administration and calling the impeachment trial a “partisan shouting match.” But after a break, Hostin returned once more to this same line of questioning.Clearly exasperated with their guest, Hostin said, “You say that Trump’s not fit to be president, and 120,000 people have died from the coronavirus. Race relations in our country are at an all-time low, and just today you’ve admitted that you were in the room when President Trump exacted a quid pro quo with Ukraine. You were in the room when he was asking for China to meddle in our election.” Holding up his book, she said: “You were in the room, which is what you say is the title of your book, and you chose not to testify!” “You are the one of the very reasons, if not the reason, that President Trump is still in office and wasn't impeached,” Hostin added. “Help me understand why your silence is not complicity in this. You were in the room where it happened!” When Bolton told her that his testimony “wasn’t going to make any difference,” Hostin shot back, “That’s not true!” “Let me finish, please,” Bolton replied, before shifting the blame to Democrats once more. “Because of the Democratic impeachment malpractice, they drove the parties into their partisan corners, and that’s where it stayed.” “I’ve chosen a different route,” he continued. “I’ve laid the evidence before the ultimate judges who are the American people, and if you don't trust their judgment, then there's a real problem with our democracy and our Constitution. They’re the ones that should make this decision, and what better time to assess the competence and character of Donald Trump than the middle of an election?” Stephen Colbert Laughs in John Bolton’s Face: How Could You Be So ‘Naive’ About Trump?Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.