Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Bolton: Ukraine probe not enough
Other Trump decisions problematic, ex-adviser says in book
John Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Donald Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.
Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William Barr.
Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election.
Trump, he writes, was “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.”
The book, The Room Where It Happened, was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday and has already become a political lightning rod in the thick of an election campaign and a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department filed a last-minute lawsuit against Bolton this week seeking to stop publication even as Trump’s critics complained that Bolton should have come forward during impeachment proceedings rather than save his account for a $2 million book contract.
Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time “since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers,” Bolton writes.
Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “[the opposite of the truth]” following some quote from the president.
“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots [like individual real estate deals], leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”
Bolton thought Trump’s diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and President Vladimir Putin of Russia were ill-advised and even “foolish” and spent much of his tenure trying to stop the president from making what he deemed bad deals. He eventually resigned last September — Trump claimed he fired him — after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Bolton, however, had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Trump, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he said they should have also looked at how Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Xi.
Trump married politics with policy during a meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, last summer, according to the book. Xi told Trump that unnamed political figures in the United States were trying to spark a new cold war with China.
“Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Bolton writes. “Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Bolton says he would have printed Trump’s exact words, “but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”
Bolton does not say these are necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to those episodes, but he reported them to Barr and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. They should have been investigated by the House, he said, and at the very least suggested abuses of a president’s duty to put the nation’s interests before his own.
“A president may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guide of national interest,” Bolton writes. “Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests,” he adds, then “there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ had been perpetrated.”