Four key points from John Bolton’s memoir
1 An offer of firsthand evidence on the Ukraine matter.
The book offers firsthand evidence that Trump linked his suspension of US$391 million in security aid for Ukraine to his demands that Ukraine publicly announce investigations into supposed wrongdoing by Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden — the heart of the impeachment case against the president.
If Bolton’s account is to be believed, it means that Trump explicitly sought to use taxpayer money as leverage to extract help from another country for his partisan political campaign, a quid pro quo that House Democrats called an abuse of power. At the time of the impeachment hearings, Republicans dismissed the accusation by saying that the witnesses offered only secondhand evidence. Bolton, by contrast, was in the room.
Bolton says that he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark Esper tried eight to 10 times to persuade the president to release the aid, which Ukraine desperately needed to defend itself against a continuing war with Russiasponsored forces. The critical meeting took place August 20 when,
Bolton writes, 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,” referring to Hillary Clinton.
2 Explaining a lack of testimony and placing blame on Democrats.
As the book nears publication and details spill out, many congressional Democrats quickly assailed Bolton for not telling his story during the impeachment proceedings and instead saving it for his US$2 million book.
Bolton explains his position in the epilogue, saying he wanted to wait to see if a judge would order his former deputy to testify over White House objections. House Democrats opted not to pursue the case, fearing endless litigation. Once the House impeached Trump over the Ukraine matter, Bolton volunteered to testify in the Senate trial that followed if subpoenaed.
But Senate Republicans voted to block new testimony by him and any other witnesses even after The New York Times reported that his forthcoming book would confirm the quid pro quo. Some of those
Republican senators said that even if Bolton was correct, it would not be enough in their minds to justify making Trump the first president in American history convicted and removed from office.
3 Singling out episodes of “obstruction of justice as a way of life”.
The other episodes that Bolton says the House should have investigated include Trump’s willingness to intervene in Justice Department investigations against foreign companies to “give personal favours to dictators he liked”. Bolton said it appeared to be “obstruction of justice as a way of life”.
He singles out Halkbank of Turkey, a state-owned financial institution investigated for a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade US sanctions on Iran. At a side encounter during a Buenos Aires summit meeting in late 2018, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey handed Trump a memo by the law firm representing Halkbank, “which Trump did nothing more than flip through before declaring he believed Halkbank was totally innocent”. He then told Erdogan “he would take care of things”.
Attorney General William Barr later spent months trying to negotiate a settlement with the bank, but that came to an end in October, after Bolton left office, when the Justice Department charged Halkbank in a six-count indictment.
4 Describing a toxic environment inside the administration.
To Bolton, Trump’s decision to meet North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, in Singapore was a “foolish mistake”, and the president’s desire to then invite Kim to the White House was “a potential disaster of enormous magnitude.” A series of presidential Twitter posts about China and North Korea were “mostly laughable”. Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki was a “self-inflicted wound” and “Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki”.
Bolton also describes an environment inside the administration marked by caustic infighting in which various players trash one another in a contest for the president’s ear — and the president trashes all of them.