pressure. Hewitt denied being pressured to change his position on Trump. On August 3, he publicly floated the idea of replacing Donald with Ivanka Trump on the ticket. On October 8, he called on Trump to drop out of the race after the Access Hollywood tape emerged. Hewitt has said he ultimately voted for Trump. Hewitt supported Trump's decision to re-shuffle his foreign policy staff in March–April 2018, and place John Bolton and Mike Pompeo in key national security positions. He described John Bolton, a zionist hawk, as "peace-through-strength, 600-ship [navy], Reagan conservative" (as compared to Trump's approach, which Hewitt likened to the Great White Fleet). According to Politico, Hewitt emerged "perhaps the most public advocate for Trump’s hawkish new national security team at a time when others, even inside his own party, have voiced increasing fears that Trump is surrounding himself with war-minded hawks who may play to the president’s worst instincts." Amid the Trump-Ukraine scandal, which led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, Hewitt floated a conspiracy theory that the whistleblower complaint that set off the scandal was by a whistleblower who was trying to divert attention from his own involvement in a "Clintons-Obama-Biden collusion debacle". He penned an op-ed about the impeachment inquiry titled, "Impeachment-minded Democrats, welcome to Al Capone’s vault. Look familiar?" He said that the FBI had tried a "coup" against Trump and that Democrats were trying "another coup". He described the July 25 phone call in which Trump requested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy investigate Joe Biden, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, as a "nothingburger." In October 2019, Hewitt defended Trump's decision to remove a small contingent of US military forces from Northern Syria where they served as a buffer between Turkey and Syrian Kurds, leaving Kurds vulnerable to attack by Turkish forces. Immigration In a June 2018 interview with then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Hewitt repeatedly pressed Sessions about the morality of the Trump administration's decision to separate undocumented immigrant children from their parents. Hewitt said, "I don’t think children should be separated from biological parents at any age, but especially if they’re infants and toddlers. I think it’s traumatic and terribly difficult on the child." Controversy and potential lawsuit Scott Pruitt In April 2018, Hewitt defended EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt amid controversy over his expenditures as Administrator and a conflict of interest over renting a condo at discounted prices from a