WASHINGTON—Chances of the Senate impeachment trial hearing new testimony appeared to mount on Monday in the wake of new allegations about President Trump’s motivation for freezing aid to Ukraine, as the president’s defense team argued that he was justified in pushing Kyiv to investigate Democrat Joe Biden and his son.
Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in a draft of his forthcoming book that Mr. Trump told him in August that he wanted to freeze aid to Ukraine until the country aided investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens. The administration’s pressure campaign on Ukraine is at the center of the impeachment investigation into the president.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, said Mr. Bolton’s allegation “essentially confirms the president committed the offenses charged in the first article of impeachment,” which accuses Mr. Trump of abusing the power of his office. He added: “How can Senate Republicans not vote to call that witness and request his documents?”
Mr. Trump, a Republican, has denied wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine. On Monday, he denied telling Mr. Bolton, whom he fired in September, anything about his decision to hold up aid to Kyiv and said he hadn’t seen the manuscript of the coming book. “I can tell you nothing was ever said to John Bolton,” he said.
Among the jury of senators, Mr. Bolton’s allegations bolstered the convictions of those Republicans leaning toward calling witnesses. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah said the reports about Mr. Bolton’s book strengthened the case for witnesses.
“At this stage, it’s pretty fair to say that John Bolton has relevant testimony to provide to those of us who are sitting in impartial justice,” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in their second day of arguments on the Senate floor, made little mention of Mr. Bolton’s allegations, instead arguing that Mr. Trump was justified in pushing for investigations into the Bidens and acted appropriately. The legal team focused on rebutting Democrats’ charges in the trial record.
At the same time, the Trump defense team began to prepare for the possibility of the Senate voting in favor of calling more witnesses, people familiar with the talks said. Among other matters, the legal team is discussing how it would work to go to court to fight a subpoena for Mr. Bolton’s testimony, the people said. Mr. Bolton, who was described by impeachment witnesses in the House as alarmed at the pressure put on Ukraine, has said he would testify in a Senate trial if subpoenaed by lawmakers, but the White House could try to sue to block him.
The House last fall had sought Mr. Bolton’s testimony but moved forward with articles of impeachment when he declined to appear without a subpoena. The House declined to subpoena him, in an effort to move quickly and not get bogged down in court fights.
White House officials said they heard from concerned senators and their aides throughout Sunday evening about Mr. Bolton’s book, many of them inquiring how long the White House had known what it alleged. Several of the president’s top aides had been unaware of the allegations on Sunday and scrambled to determine who had reviewed the book.
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At a closed-door GOP lunch before Monday’s trial session, Mr. Romney spoke forcefully about the need to have Mr. Bolton testify before the Senate, according to people familiar with the matter. Also at the lunch, Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) suggested a trade of Mr. Bolton’s testimony for that of a witness Republicans want to call, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Toomey’s office declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing private deliberations during Senate lunches.
Other Republicans skeptical of the need for witnesses said the ground had shifted. The allegations “will probably make the dynamic different” for senators, said Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana. “I’m not going to deny it’s going to change the decibel level and probably the intensity at which we go about talking about witnesses,” he said.
Mr. Bolton’s allegation contradicts the White House’s argument that the decision to hold up nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine wasn’t related to the president’s push for investigations. Democrats have said the president abused his power by leveraging aid approved by Congress to get a foreign leader to undertake actions that would help him get re-elected.
Democrats, citing witnesses and documents the White House kept from House impeachment investigators, have pushed to have more material presented in the Senate trial. To get that, they will need at least four GOP votes. A vote on witnesses is expected to take place later this week, after the defense team wraps its arguments and senators question both sides.
On Monday, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, at the outset of the session, indicated that the team didn’t plan to delve into Mr. Bolton’s allegations. “We deal with transcript evidence. We deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all,” he said.
Alan Dershowitz, another member of the president’s legal team, added later that day: “Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”
Mr. Sekulow doubled down on the argument that Democrats relied on circumstantial evidence to make the case that the president conditioned aid to Ukraine on the announcement of new investigations.
“Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigation and security assistance, a presidential meeting or anything else,” Mr. Sekulow said on the Senate floor.
While no administration officials during the fall’s House hearings testified that they were told directly by Mr. Trump that he was holding up the aid to pressure Kyiv, four current and former officials said they understood that to be the case.
In presentations, the president’s lawyers argued that impeachment had devolved into a political weapon and that Democrats had improperly managed the process of impeaching the president, while defending efforts by Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who led the push for investigations in Ukraine.
“He was doing what good defense attorneys do,” said Jane Raskin, a member of the president’s team.
Mr. Trump released the aid to Ukraine in September without any announcement of an investigation, a move he took after the freeze became public.
Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and a member of the president’s defense team, sought to turn the spotlight to Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine, relying on news reports during the Obama administration to argue that his actions were deserving of investigation.
“They say sham. They say baseless,” Ms. Bondi said. “They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what, maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ their case crumbles.”
Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that it was corrupt for Hunter Biden to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father as vice president was overseeing U.S. efforts to combat corruption in Ukraine. No evidence has emerged of direct wrongdoing by either Biden. Hunter Biden has said that serving on the company’s board showed poor judgment given his father’s anticorruption efforts.
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A Biden campaign spokesman said the former vice president was “instrumental to a bipartisan and international anticorruption victory” and said: “The conspiracy theory that Bondi repeated has been conclusively refuted.”
Some of the president’s team’s most prominent lawyers presented their arguments on Monday. Mr. Dershowitz, a constitutional law professor who has served as a defense attorney in high-profile cases, argued that the articles of impeachment passed by the House—for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—would have been viewed by the framers of the Constitution as overly broad and, as noncriminal conduct, “are outside the range of impeachable offenses.”
Mr. Dershowitz’s co-counsel in the impeachment trial, Kenneth Starr, argued that impeachments have become too common and politically motivated. Two decades earlier while serving as independent counsel, Mr. Starr led the investigation that recommended impeachment counts against President Clinton on allegations including perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
Republicans appeared blindsided by Mr. Bolton’s claims on Monday. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said the senator didn’t have any advance notice of the book’s allegations.
It wasn’t clear that any senators who previously planned to vote against new testimony had changed their minds, though the tenor of some of the harshest opponents to new witnesses—such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.)—shifted on Monday.
Mr. Graham said that if Mr. Bolton testifies, then he wants to see witnesses favored by the president also testify—among them the Bidens and the whistleblower whose complaint helped set off the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Graham had previously said he would vote against subpoenaing Hunter Biden.
“If we add to the record, we are going to do it completely,” he said.
After Mr. Romney pushed for Mr. Bolton to testify at Monday’s lunch, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R., Ga.), who was sworn into her seat this month, took the unusual move of attacking Mr. Romney by name on Twitter. “Sadly, my colleague @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) didn’t say whether the allegations had changed his mind on witnesses, but told reporters: “My guess is John Bolton tells the truth.” Mr. Johnson spoke to Mr. Bolton in August about his concerns about the frozen aid, he told The Wall Street Journal last year. Mr. Bolton told him to raise his concerns directly with the president.
—Michael C. Bender, Lindsay Wise and Natalie Andrews contributed to this article.
Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com and Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@wsj.com
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