BOLTON BOMBSHELLS
TRUMP MOCKED BY AIDES, COZIED UP TO DICTATORS
President Trump asked several foreign countries to help him get reelected, gave “personal favors to dictators” and was mocked as sophomoric and “full of s—t” by top aides behind his back, according to a forthcoming book by former national security adviser John Bolton.
Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened” — copies of which were obtained by The New York Times and The Washington Post and independently confirmed by the Daily News ahead of its June 23 publication — paints a devastating portrait of Trump’s presidency and suggests he should have been impeached for a range of transgressions beyond his Ukraine scandal.
For starters, Bolton writes that during a private meeting in June 2019, Trump pleaded with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win reelection, specifically by purchasing plenty of American agricultural products before November 2020.
Alongside that eyebrowraising request, Trump made it a hallmark of his presidency to try to derail Justice Department investigations into companies in countries whose authoritarian leaders he had a penchant for, according to Bolton.
“The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life,” Bolton writes in the 592-page memoir, adding that Trump was attempting to effectively “give personal favors to dictators he liked.”
Two companies Bolton says Trump sought to get the Justice Department to stop scrutinizing were Turkey’s Halkbank and China’s ZTE, both of which are under investigation for fraud and bribery by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
In the case of Halkbank, Trump specifically tied the investigation to “Obama people” during a 2018 meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Bolton.
“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.
Trump’s efforts were aimed at pleasing Xi and Erdogan in hope of one day getting the favors returned, always with an eye toward his own reelection prospects, Bolton writes.
Trump’s apparent pattern of intervening in U.S. law enforcement and seeking foreign election interference was on full display in his multipronged bid to pressure Ukraine to boost his 2020 campaign by launching investigations of Joe Biden and other Democrats — an effort that got him impeached.
Bolton’s book confirms the impeachment inquiry findings that Trump used $391 million in U.S. military aid as leverage to bully the Europe an country’s leaders into digging up political dirt on his opponents. Bolton also writes that he, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Epser tried at least eight times to get Trump to release the congressionally approved aid.
Bolton, who resigned as national security adviser in September 2019, suggests in his book that the Republicancontrolled Senate may not have acquitted Trump if the House had expanded its impeachment scope to include Trump’s China and Turkey quid pro quos.
“Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different,” Bolton writes.
Bolton says he was so concerned by Trump’s various scandals that he brought them to the attention of Attorney General William Barr.
Barr told Bolton he was also concerned by the president’s behavior, but apparently didn’t act, according to the book.
Beyond impeachment and alleged quid pro quos, Bolton shares a number of embarrassing anecdotes about the president in the book.
During Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Pompeo slipped Bolton a handwritten note that ridiculed the president, saying, “He’s so full of s—t,” according to the book.
Despite vociferously defending Trump in public, Pompeo told Bolton about a month after the note-passing that there was “zero probability of success” for the president’s North Korea policy.
Spokesmen for the White House, Pompeo and Barr did not return requests for comment on Wednesday.
The bombshell Bolton revelations came one day after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block the book from being released over allegations that it contains classified information. Trump has threatened Bolton with “criminal problems” over the tell-all tome.
But Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, smacked down the request as “frivolous, politically motivated” and pointless.
“Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s [book] have already been distributed around the country and the world,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster. “The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.”