John Bolton’s opinion about a call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is at the heart of the impeachment trial currently underway in the Senate.

A leaked manuscript of Bolton’s new book “The Room Where It Happened” alleges Trump threatened to withhold $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine “until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats and the Bidens,” The New York Times reports.

But an interview Bolton gave to a Ukrainian reporter last August paints a much different picture of Trump’s communications with the country’s leaders, which Bolton described at the time as “warm and cordial.”

“Do you plan to meet President Zelensky, and what messages did you bring to him?” the reporter asked Bolton in the RadioFreeEurope interview.

“Well, I will be meeting President Zelensky. He and President Trump have already spoken twice. The president called to congratulate President Zelensky on his election, and then on his success in the parliamentary election.

“They were very warm and cordial calls,” he said. “We’re hoping they’ll be able to meet in Warsaw and have a few minutes together, because the success of Ukraine maintaining its freedom, its system of representative government, a free-market economy free of corruption, and dealing with the problems of the Danbass and the Crimea are high priorities here, obviously, but they’re high priorities for the United States, as well.”

The interview sheds new light on Bolton’s mindset and perspective on the relationship between the Trump and Zelensky as the president’s impeachment trial continues in the Senate.

Bolton’s leaked book manuscript renewed calls from Democrats to compel Trump’s former National Security Advisor to testify under oath, something House Democrats failed to accomplish during the impeachment proceedings in the lower chamber.

The so-called “bombshells” in the manuscript have also prompted fierce blowback from the POTUS himself, who disputed the allegations and blasted the “nasty & untrue book” on Twitter.

“Why didn’t John Bolton complain about this ‘nonsense’ a long time ago, when he was very publicly terminated. He said, not that it matters, NOTHING!” Trump tweeted.

“For a guy who couldn’t get approved for Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn’t get approved for anything since, ‘begged’ me for a non Senate approved job, which I gave him despite many saying ‘Don’t do it, sir,’ takes the job, mistakenly says ‘Libyan Model’ on T.V., and many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book,” he wrote.

“All Classified National Security,” Trump tweeted. “Who would do this?”

On Wednesday, Senior Director for Records, Access, and Information Security Management Ellen J. Knight sent a letter to Bolton’s attorney to inform the former National Security Advisor that his book was not approved by the government for publication because it “contains significant amounts of classified information.

“It also appears that some of this classified information is at the TOP SECRET level, which is defined by Executive Order 13526 as information that ‘reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security’ of the United States if disclosed without authorization,” Knight wrote.

“Under federal law and the nondisclosure agreements your client signed as a condition for gaining access to classified information, the manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of the classified information.”

The manuscript is now under review to identify all of the classified information that must be removed for publication, Knight wrote.