Bolton: Trump sought Xi’s help with reelection
Book calls president uninformed on basic facts about the world
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 U.S. 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 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.
While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials.
It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.
Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.
Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of s---.”
A month later, Bolton writes, Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”
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.”
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. And Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.
“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 North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and President Vladimir Putin of Russia were “foolish,” and he 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 Ukraine. 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.