Trump slams Bolton book as ‘pure fiction’
FORMER TOP AIDE SAYS PRESIDENT IS ‘NOT FIT FOR OFFICE’
US President Donald Trump has dismissed former top aide John Bolton’s explosive accusations about the White House in an upcoming book as “pure fiction”.
In a tweet calling the former national security adviser a “sick puppy”, Trump said the book is “a compilation of lies ... all intended to make me look bad. Many of the ridiculous statements he attributes to me were never made, pure fiction”.
Bolton’s 577-page book titled The Room Where It Happened: A
White House Memoir is the most vivid, first-person account yet of Trump’s conduct in office.
Trump isn’t “fit for office” and lacks the “competence” to serve as president, Bolton said.
Trump ‘pleaded’ for China’s help in 2020 re-election
Trump “pleaded” with China’s President Xi Jinping during a 2019 Osaka summit to help his re-election prospects, according to Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser for a 17-month period.
“He, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton said.
Ukraine scandal
The book also alleges that Trump directly tied providing military aid to Ukraine to the country’s willingness to conduct investigations into his Democratic challenger Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter.
In one conversation, Trump said “he wasn’t in favour of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over,” Bolton writes.
The White House on Wednesday asked a federal court for an emergency temporary restraining order against its release.
House Speaker Pelosi said she will meet key committee chairmen “to make a judgment” on what to do in response to Bolton’s accusations. “It’s not necessarily whether we subpoena or what,” she said.
Us President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 US election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects, according to a damning new account of life inside the Trump administration by former national security adviser John Bolton.
During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released on June 23 that “Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.
“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
Ukraine quid pro quo
The episode described by Bolton in his book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House
Memoir, bears striking similarities to the actions that resulted in Trump’s impeachment after he sought to pressure the Ukrainian president to help dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance.
And on the Ukraine scandal itself, Bolton cites personal conversations with Trump confirming a “quid pro quo” that Trump had long denied. “He said he wasn’t in favour of sending them anything until all Russiainvestigation material related to [Hillary] Clinton and Biden had been turned over,” Bolton writes.
‘Stunningly uninformed’
The 592-page memoir, obtained by The Washington Post, is the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades. It portrays Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” commander in chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders.
Seeking favours
The request for electoral assistance from Xi is one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favours from leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the US president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes.
In one May 2019 phone call, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaid to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicols Maduro.
Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.”
Turkish memo
In May 2018, Bolton says, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan handed Trump a memo claiming innocence for a Turkish firm under investigation by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York for violating Iranian sanctions.
“Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people,” Bolton writes. He says
he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favours for Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to discuss his behaviour.
Impeachment episode: Unacceptable behaviour
Bolton broadly confirms the outline of the impeachment case
laid out by Democratic lawmakers and witnesses in House proceedings earlier this year.
However, Bolton, who resisted Democratic calls to testify without a subpoena, is silent on the question of whether he believes that Trump’s actions related to Ukraine were impeachable But he writes that he found Trump’s decision to hold up military assistance to pressure newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “deeply disturbing”.
“I thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally and unacceptable as presidential behaviour,” he writes.
Frustration among officials, advisers
Bolton describes the president’s advisers as frequently flummoxed by Trump and said a range of officials — including Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton himself — all considered resigning in disgust or frustration. Even some of the president’s most loyal advisers hold a grim view of him in private, he writes.
“What if we have a real crisis like 9/11 with the way he makes decisions?” Kelly is quoted as asking at one point as he considers resigning.
Trump: Is Finland part of Russia?
Bolton recounts numerous
private conversations Trump had with other leaders that revealed the limits of his knowledge.
He recalls Trump asking Kelly if Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the United Kingdom as a “nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?”
Litany of shocking statements
Bolton’s book is also filled with examples of Trump’s closest advisers sharply criticising the president behind his back, including Pompeo. Bolton attributes a litany of shocking statements to the president.
Trump said invading Venezuela would be “cool” and that the South American nation was “really part of the United States.” Bolton says Trump kept confusing the current and former presidents of Afghanistan, while asking Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to help him strike a deal with Iran. He also describes a summer 2019 meeting in New Jersey where Trump says journalists should be jailed so they have to divulge their sources: “These people should be executed. They are scumbags,” Trump said, according to Bolton’s account.
Mixing up advisers
For extensive periods of time, Trump kept telling different advisers they were in charge of border policy, according to Bolton’s book. One day in 2018 in the Oval Office, Kelly purportedly learnt that Kushner was calling Mexican authorities when he barged in the Oval Office and said so. “Why is Jared calling Mexicans?” Kelly asked loudly, according to the book. “Because I asked him to. How else are we going to stop the caravans?” Trump responded.
‘Russia should take care of Daesh terrorists’
At one point, arguing in 2018 with former defence secretary Jim Mattis, Trump told him that Russia should take care of Daesh. “We’re seven thousand miles away but we’re still the target,” Trump said, according to the account. “They’ll come to our shores. That’s what they all say. It’s a horror show. At some point we’ve got to get out.”
Describing the conflict in Afghanistan, Trump said: “This was done by a stupid person named George Bush.”
Kim Jong Un must have Elton John’s Rocket Man
Determined to make friends with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump decided he wanted to give him a range of American gifts — gifts that broke the US sanctions that eventually had to be waived. In the months following the summit, Bolton described Trump’s inordinate interest in Pompeo delivering an autographed copy of Elton John’s Rocket Man CD to Kim during Pompeo’s follow on visit to North Korea.
Trump originally used the term “Rocket Man” to criticise the North Korean leader but subsequently tried to convince Kim that it was a term of affection.
“Trump didn’t seem to realise Pompeo hadn’t actually seen Kim Jong Un [during the trip], asking if Pompeo had handed” the CD, wrote Bolton. “Pompeo had not. Getting this CD to Kim remained a high priority for several months.”
[Trump] stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
John Bolton | former US national security adviser