Trump ‘asks China for help’

RE-ELECTION: EX-AIDE MAKES STARTLING CLAIMS IN BOOK

‘Focus on winning a second term the driving principle of his foreign policy.’

Donald Trump pleaded with China’s leader Xi Jinping for help to win re-election in 2020, the US president’s former national security advisor John Bolton wrote in an explosive new behind-the-scenes book, according to excerpts published on Wednesday.

Bolton alleged in a blistering critique that Trump’s focus on winning a second term was the driving principle of his foreign policy and that top aides routinely disparaged the Republican leader for his ignorance of basic geopolitical facts.

In excerpts published by

The

Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Bolton also claimed Trump repeatedly showed a readiness to overlook Chinese human rights abuses – most strikingly telling Xi the mass internment of Uighur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do”.

“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton wrote.

In a key meeting with

Xi last June, Trump “stunningly turned the conversation to the US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win”, Bolton claimed in his upcoming tell-all.

Bolton wrote that Trump stressed the importance of US farmers and how “increased Chinese

purchases of soya beans and wheat” could impact the US electoral outcome.

In a sign of Trump’s anger over the memoir, the justice department filed an emergency order late on Wednesday seeking a halt to publication, the second time in as many days it has tried to block the book.

Arguing that Bolton failed to allow completion of vetting of the book as required, the department urged the court to take action to “prevent the harm to national security that will result if his manuscript is published to the world”.

Bolton “broke the law” by divulging “highly classified information”, Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. He also derided his former advisor as “washed up”, and mocked Bolton’s past support for the US war in Iraq.

Bolton broke the law by divulging classified information