Peter Baker
1 hr ago
John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in
his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have
investigated President 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.
© Doug Mills/The New York Times John R. Bolton was President Trump’s national security
adviser for 17 months. Mr. Trump asked if Finland was part of Russia, Mr.
Bolton wrote in his new book.
Mr.
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,”
Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General
William P. Barr.
The
book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was obtained by The New York Times in the 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 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the
bookstores. The Justice Department filed a last-minute lawsuit against Mr. Bolton this week seeking
to stop publication even as Mr. Trump’s critics complained that Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
© Doug Mills/The New York Times While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides
and even an anonymous senior official has revealed much about the Trump White
House, Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking
official.
Mr.
Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and
asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader,
according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note
disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of s**t.”
An a month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. 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.” Mr. Trump likes pitting staff members against one
another, at one point telling Mr. Bolton that former Secretary of State Rex W.
Tillerson had once referred to Nikki R. Haley, then the ambassador to the
United Nations, by a sexist obscenity — an assertion Mr. Bolton seemed to doubt
but found telling that the president would make it.
Mr.
Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book
regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some
quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching
philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven
instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his
view, dangerous and reckless.
“His the thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals),
leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes.
“That had its pros and cons.”
Mr.
Bolton is a complicated, controversial figure. A former official under
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush who rose to United
Nations ambassador, he has been one of the most vocal advocates for a hard-line
foreign policy, a supporter of the Iraq war who has favored possible military
action against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.
Like
Mr. Tillerson and other officials who went to work for Mr. Trump believing they
could manage him, Mr. Bolton agreed to become the president’s third national
security adviser in 2018 thinking he understood the risks and limits. But
unlike some of the so-called “axis of adults,” as he calls Mr. Tillerson and
former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who tried to minimize what they saw as the
damage of the president’s tenure, Mr. Bolton sought to use his 17 months in the
White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him, like
withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he
considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others.
Mr.
Bolton thought Mr. Trump’s diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North
Korea’s Kim Jong-un and President Vladimir V. 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 — Mr. Trump claimed he fired him
— after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine, and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mr.
Bolton did not agree to testify during the House impeachment inquiry last fall,
saying he would wait to see if a judge would rule that former aides like him
should do so over White House objections. But after the House impeached Mr.
Trump for pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into
Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., while
withholding security aid, Mr. Bolton offered to testify in the Senate trial if
subpoenaed.
Senate
Republicans blocked calling Mr. Bolton as a witness even after The Times reported in January that his then-unpublished
book confirmed that Mr. Trump linked the suspended security aid to his
insistence that Ukraine investigates his political rivals. The Senate went on to
acquit Mr. Trump almost entirely along party lines. But Mr. Bolton engendered
great anger among critics of the president for not making his account public
before now.
The the book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the
president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and that Mr. Trump explicitly linked
the security aid to investigations involving Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton. On
Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them
anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and
Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense
Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the
aid.
Mr.
Bolton, however, had nothing for scorn for the House Democrats who impeached
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 President Xi Jinping.
Mr.
Bolton also recounts a discussion at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka,
Japan, last summer at which the president overtly linked policy to his own
political fortunes as he asked Mr. Xi to buy a lot of American agricultural
products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. 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.”
Mr.
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 Mr. Barr and Pat A. 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 ahead of
his own.
“An 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,” Mr. 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.
John Bolton: The Scandal of Trump's
China Policy
John Bolton
1 hr ago
© Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S.
strategy toward the People’s Republic of China has rested for more than four
decades on two basic propositions. The first is that the Chinese economy would
be changed irreversibly by the rising prosperity caused by market-oriented
policies, greater foreign investment, ever-deeper interconnections with global
markets and broader acceptance of international economic norms. Bringing China
into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was the apotheosis of this
assessment.
The
second proposition is that, as China’s national wealth increased, so too,
inevitably, would its political openness. As China became more democratic, it
would avoid competition for regional or global hegemony, and the risk of
international conflict—hot or cold—would recede.
Both
propositions were fundamentally incorrect. After joining the WTO, China did
exactly the opposite of what was predicted. China gamed the organization,
pursuing a mercantilist policy in a supposedly free-trade body. China stole
intellectual property, forced technology transfers from foreign businesses and
continued managing its economy in authoritarian ways.
Get news and analysis on politics, policy, national security and more,
delivered right to your inbox
Politically,
China moved away from democracy, not toward it. In Xi Jinping, China now has
its most powerful leader and its most centralized government since Mao Zedong.
Ethnic and religious persecution on a massive scale continues. Meanwhile, China
has created a formidable offensive cyberwarfare program, built a blue-water
navy for the first time in 500 years, increased its arsenal of nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles, and more.
I
saw these developments as a threat to U.S. strategic interests and to our
friends and allies. The Obama administration basically sat back and watched it
happen.
President
Donald Trump in some respects embodies the growing U.S. concern about China. He
appreciates the key truth that politico-military power rests on a strong economy.
Trump frequently says that stopping China’s unfair economic growth at America’s
expense is the best way to defeat China militarily, which is fundamentally
correct.
But
the real question is what Trump does about China’s threat. His advisers are
badly fractured intellectually. The administration has “panda huggers” like
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; confirmed free-traders like National
Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow; and China hawks like Commerce Secretary
Wilbur Ross, lead trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer and White House trade
adviser Peter Navarro.
After
I became Trump’s national security adviser in April 2018, I had the most futile
role of all: I wanted to fit China trade policy into a broader strategic
framework. We had a good slogan, calling for a “free and open Indo-Pacific”
region. But a bumper sticker is not a strategy, and we struggled to avoid being
sucked into the black hole of U.S.-China trade issues.
Trade
matters were handled from day one in a completely chaotic way. Trump’s favorite
way to proceed was to get small armies of people together, either in the Oval
Office or the Roosevelt Room, to argue out these complex, controversial issues.
Over and over again, the same issues. Without a resolution, or even worse, one
outcome one day and a contrary outcome a few days later. The whole thing made
my head hurt.
With
the November 2018 midterm elections looming, there was little progress on the
China trade front. Attention turned to the coming Buenos Aires G-20 summit the
following month, when Xi and Trump could meet personally. Trump saw this as the
meeting of his dreams, with the two big guys getting together, leaving the
Europeans aside, cutting the big deal.
What
could go wrong? Plenty, in Lighthizer’s view. He was very worried about how
much Trump would give away once untethered.
In
Buenos Aires on Dec. 1, at dinner, Xi began by telling Trump how wonderful he
was, laying it on thick. Xi read steadily through note cards, doubtless all of
it hashed out arduously in advance. Trump ad-libbed, with no one on the U.S.
side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next.
One
highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years,
and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional
limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Xi said the U.S. had too many
elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded
approvingly.
Xi
finally shifted to substance, describing China’s positions: The U.S. would roll
back Trump’s existing tariffs, and both parties would refrain from competitive
currency manipulation and agree not to engage in cyber thievery (how
thoughtful). The U.S. should eliminate Trump’s tariffs, Xi said, or at least
agree to forgo new ones. “People expect this,” said Xi, and I feared at that
moment that Trump would simply say yes to everything Xi had laid out.
Trump
came close, unilaterally offering that U.S. tariffs would remain at 10% rather
than rise to 25%, as he had previously threatened. In exchange, Trump asked merely
for some increases in Chinese farm-product purchases, to help with the crucial
farm-state vote. If that could be agreed, all the U.S. tariffs would be
reduced. It was breathtaking.
Trump
asked Lighthizer if he had left anything out, and Lighthizer did what he could
to get the conversation back onto the plane of reality, focusing on the
structural issues and ripping apart the Chinese proposal. Trump closed by
saying Lighthizer would be in charge of the deal-making, and Jared Kushner
would also be involved, at which point all the Chinese perked up and smiled.
The decisive play came in May 2019, when the Chinese reneged on several key
elements of the emerging agreement, including all the structural issues. For
me, this was proof that China simply wasn’t serious.
Trump
spoke with Xi by phone on June 18, just over a week ahead of the year’s G-20
summit in Osaka, Japan, where they would next meet. Trump began by telling Xi
he missed him and then said that the most popular thing he had ever been
involved with was making a trade deal with China, which would be a big plus for
him politically.
In
their meeting in Osaka on June 29, Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed)
American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war with China.
Whether
Xi meant to finger the Democrats or some of us sitting on the U.S. side of the
table, I don’t know, but Trump immediately assumed that Xi meant the Democrats.
Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility to China among the
Democrats. Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S.
presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and 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. I would print
Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has
decided otherwise.
Trump
then raised the trade negotiations’ collapse the previous month, urging China
to return to the positions it had retracted and conclude the most exciting,
largest deal ever. He proposed that for the remaining $350 billion of trade
imbalances (by Trump’s arithmetic), the U.S. would not impose tariffs, but he
again returned to importuning Xi to buy as many American farm products as China
could.
Xi
agreed that we should restart the trade talks, welcoming Trump’s concession
that there would be no new tariffs and agreeing that the two negotiating teams
should resume discussions on farm products on a priority basis. “You’re the
greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!” exulted Trump, amending that a few
minutes later to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”
Subsequent
negotiations, after I resigned, did lead to an interim “deal” announced in
December 2019, but there was less to it than met the eye.
Trump’s
conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy
but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and the U.S.
national interests. Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on
trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am
hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House
tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.
Take
Trump’s handling of the threats posed by the Chinese telecommunications firms
Huawei and ZTE. Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce the U.S.
regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms’
flouting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most
important goal for Chinese “companies” like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate
telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject
them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the U.S.
characterization of their activities).
Trump,
by contrast, I saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an
opportunity to make personal gestures to Xi. In 2018, for example, he reversed
penalties that Ross and the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE. In 2019, he
offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the
trade deal—which, of course, was primarily about getting Trump re-elected in
2020.
These
and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of
fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the
presidency. 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.
As
the trade talks went on, Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction over China’s bullying had
been growing. An extradition bill provided the spark, and by early June 2019,
massive protests were underway in Hong Kong.
I
first heard Trump react on June 12, upon hearing that some 1.5 million people
had been at Sunday’s demonstrations. “That’s a big deal,” he said. But he
immediately added, “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights
problems too.”
I
hoped Trump would see these Hong Kong developments as giving him leverage over
China. I should have known better. That same month, on the 30th anniversary of
China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Trump
refused to issue a White House statement. “That was 15 years ago,” he said,
inaccurately. “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want
anything.” And that was that.
Beijing’s
repression of its Uighur citizens also proceeded apace. Trump asked me at the
2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China
over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily
in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.
At
the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only
interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building
concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that
Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the
right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew
Pottinger told me that Trump said something very similar during his November
2017 trip to China.
Trump
was particularly dyspeptic about Taiwan, having listened to Wall Street
financiers who had gotten rich off mainland China investments. One of Trump’s
favorite comparisons was to point to the tip of one of his Sharpies and say,
“This is Taiwan,” then point to the historic Resolute desk in the Oval Office
and say, “This is China.” So much for American commitments and obligations to
another democratically.
More
Thunder out of China came in 2020 with the coronavirus pandemic. China
withheld, fabricated and distorted information about the disease; suppressed
dissent from physicians and others; hindered efforts by the World Health
Organization and others to get accurate information, and engaged inactive
disinformation campaigns, trying to argue that the new coronavirus did not
originate in China.
There
was plenty to criticize in Trump’s response, starting with the administration’s
early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have
little or no economic effect. Trump’s reflex to try to talk his way out of
anything, even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility,
with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible
public-health advice.
Other
criticisms of the administration, however, were frivolous. One such complaint
targeted part of the general streamlining of NSC staffing I conducted in my
first months at the White House. To reduce duplication and overlap and enhance
coordination and efficiency, it made good management sense to shift the
responsibilities of the NSC directorate dealing with global health and
biodefense into the directorate dealing with biological, chemical, and nuclear
weapons. Bioweapon attacks and pandemics can have much in common, and the
medical and public-health expertise required to deal with both threats goes
hand in hand. Most of the personnel working in the prior global health
directorate simply moved to the combined directorate and continued doing
exactly what they were doing before.
At
most, the internal NSC structure was the quiver of a butterfly’s wings in the
tsunami of Trump’s chaos. Despite the indifference at the top of the White
House, the cognizant NSC staffers did their duty in the pandemic, raising
options like shutdowns and social distancing far before Trump did so in March.
The NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the
chair behind the Resolute desk that was empty.
In
today’s pre-2020 election climate, Trump has made a sharp turn to anti-China
rhetoric. Frustrated in his search for the big China trade deal, and mortally
afraid of the negative political effects of the coronavirus pandemic on his
re-election prospects, Trump has now decided to blame China, with ample
justification. Whether his actions will match his words remains to be seen. His
administration has signaled that Beijing’s suppression of dissent in Hong Kong
will have consequences, but no actual consequences have yet been imposed.
Most
important of all, will Trump’s current China pose last beyond election day? The
Trump's presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is
grounded in Trump. That is something to think about for those, especially China
realists, who believe they know what he will do in a second term.
—Mr.
Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., served as national security
adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. This essay is adapted from his
forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which
Simon & Schuster will publish on June 23.
Trump asked China’s Xi to help him win
reelection, according to Bolton book
Josh Dawsey
1 hr ago
John R. Bolton wearing
a suit and tie: The lawsuit was closely watched because of the potential
implications it carried for another witness whose testimony has been sought by
Democrats: former national security adviser John Bolton.
Next Slide
1/3
SLIDES © Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
The lawsuit was
closely watched because of the potential implications it carried for another the witness whose testimony has been sought by Democrats: former national security
adviser John Bolton.
President
Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S.
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 next week 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 U.S. presidential
election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing
campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed
the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and
wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words but the
government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”
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.
The China allegation also comes amid ongoing warnings from U.S. intelligence
agencies about foreign election interference in November, as Russia did to
favor Trump in 2016.
Bolton’s
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 and is a longtime contributor to Fox News. It portrays Trump as an
“erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” commander in chief, and lays out along
series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top
advisers and foreign leaders.
The
book is the subject of an escalating legal battle between the longtime
conservative foreign policy hand and the Justice Department, which filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking
to block its publication by alleging that it contains classified material.
Bolton’s attorney has said the book does not contain classified material and
that it underwent an arduous review process.
Bolton
describes the book as being based on both contemporaneous accounts and his own
notes, and it includes numerous details of internal meetings and direct
quotations attributed to Trump and others. Trump allies have already begun
launching attacks on Bolton and his motives, including describing him as “Book
Deal Bolton.”
The
request for electoral assistance from Xi is just one of many instances
described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian
leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the
U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through
simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.
In
one May 2019 phone call, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to 2016 Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of
Soviet-style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás
Maduro. Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.”
In
May 2018, Bolton says, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan handed Trump a
memo claiming innocence for a Turkish firm under investigation by the U.S.
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.
Bolton
says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such
as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with Attorney General William P.
Barr in 2019 to discuss his behavior. Bolton writes that Barr agreed he also
was worried about the appearances created by the president’s behavior.
In
his account, Bolton broadly confirms the outline of the impeachment case laid
out by Democratic lawmakers and witnesses in House proceedings earlier this
year, writing that Trump was fixated on a bogus claim that Ukraine tried to
hurt him and was in thrall to unfounded conspiracy theories pushed by
presidential lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others.
Trump
was impeached in January by the Democratic-controlled House of abuse of power
and obstruction of Congress, before being acquitted by
the GOP-controlled Senate the next month. Bolton resisted Democratic calls to
testify without a subpoena.
Bolton
is silent on the question of whether he believes that Trump’s actions Ukraine
were impeachable and is deeply critical of how House Democrats managed the
process. But he writes that he found Trump’s decision to hold up military
assistance to pressure newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky
“deeply disturbing,” and that he tried to work internally to counter it,
reporting concerns to Barr and the White House Counsel’s Office.
“I
thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally and unacceptable
as presidential behavior,” he writes.
In
the memoir, Bolton describes the president's advisers as frequently flummoxed
by Trump and said a range of officials — including Chief of Staff John F.
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.
“He
second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained
stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal
government,” Bolton writes, always looking to “personal instinct” and
opportunities for “reality TV showmanship.”
Given
Bolton’s expertise and his White House role from 2018 to 2019, the book is
heavily focused on a range of foreign policy episodes and decisions, from
Ukraine and Venezuela to North Korea and Iran.
Bolton
recounts numerous private conversations Trump had with other leaders that
revealed the limits of his knowledge. He recalls Trump asking Kelly if the
nation of Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime
Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the UK as a
“nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton
adds that he could tell the question about Britain, which has long maintained a
nuclear arsenal, “was not intended as a joke.”
Bolton’s
commentary ranges from expressions of disgust with the president’s actions to
relief that his advisers were able to prevent catastrophe. During a NATO summit
in the summer of 2018, Bolton recounts a moment when Trump had decided to
inform U.S. allies that the United States was going to withdraw from NATO if
allies didn’t substantially increase defense spending by January.
“We
will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid],” read a message Trump
dictated to Bolton.
Bolton
tried to stop Trump from delivering the threat, and became even more alarmed
when Trump told him, “Do you want to do something historic?”
During
one trade meeting, Trump grew irate when advisers began discussing Japan and
the alliance, and began railing about Pearl Harbor, Bolton writes.
Bolton’s
book is also filled with examples of Trump’s closest advisers sharply
criticizing the president behind his back, including Pompeo.
After
Trump completed a phone call with South Korea’s president ahead of 2018
Singapore summit with North Korea, Pompeo, and Bolton shared their disdain for
the president’s handling of the conversation, he writes. Pompeo, having
listened in on the call from the Middle East, told Bolton he was “having a
cardiac arrest in Saudi Arabia.” Bolton shared his similar disappointment with
the call, describing it as a “near-death experience.”
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. And Trump told Xi that
Americans were clamoring for him to change the constitutional rules to serve
more than two terms, according to the book.
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.
Bolton
describes in-depth the feuding and backbiting among Trump’s cadre of advisers,
as well as referring dismissively to Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner’s efforts
to get involved in domestic and foreign policy issues. Almost every adviser —
including Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the former defense secretary
Jim Mattis, Former Secretary Mike Pompeo, and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley —
comes under the scalpel. By contrast, Bolton seems to hold himself in high
regard and admits a few mistakes of his own.
For
Trump, Bolton writes, one singular goal loomed above all: securing a second
term.
“I
am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure
that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes.
Bolton
says Trump said he wanted out of Afghanistan during his second year instead of
his third year so he could blame President Obama for the war. Screaming about
the border wall in a meeting with top advisers in 2018, Trump described why
illegal immigration had to go down and the wall had to go up, according to
Bolton’s book.
“I
got elected on this issue and now I’m going to get unelected,” Trump said,
startling those around him.
For
all his public bluster, Bolton describes Trump as frequently uncertain, fretful
and wobbly during difficult policy choices.
For
instance, driven by a desire to please Florida Republicans, Trump talked
tough about his desire to oust Maduro throughout much of 2018. But Bolton
portrays Trump as inconsistent and worry-worn when presented with the
opportunity to support Guaidó, who declared himself the nation’s president in
January 2019. Though Trump approved of a proposal from Bolton to publicly
declare the United States recognized Guaidó rather than Maduro, within 30 hours
Trump was already worrying that Guaidó appeared weak — a “kid” compared to
“tough” Maduro — and considering changing course. “You couldn’t make this up,”
Bolton writes.
In
describing his White House experience on Russia-related issues, Bolton presents
a picture of a president who is impulsive, churlish and consistently opposed to
U.S. policy designed to discourage Russian aggression and to sanction Putin’s
malign behavior.
Bolton
spends little effort trying to explain Trump’s sympathetic approach to Putin.
But the book makes the case that there is a disturbing and undeniable pattern
of presidential reluctance to embrace policies designed to inhibit Russian
aggression. He describes in detail the events leading up to the widely panned
Helsinki summit in July 2018, when Trump sided with Putin against the U.S.
intelligence agencies over Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election.
“This
was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing
uproariously at what he had gotten away within Helsinki,” Bolton writes.
Soon
after he arrived at the White House, Bolton said Kelly gave him a warning. “You
can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here,” Kelly said, according to
Bolton’s book. “This is a bad place to work, as you will find out.”
Throughout
the book describes Trump and top advisers repeatedly slashing each other,
lying to each other, and outmaneuvering each other to gain an advantage.
At
one point, Bolton says, Trump turns to him with a familiar question:
Should he replace Vice President Pence with Haley on the 2020 ticket? According
to his book, the idea was floated by Kushner and his wife, Trump’s daughter
Ivanka. Bolton said it would be a mistake, and Trump seemed to agree.
At
another point, Bolton says he learned Kushner was going to be calling the finance minister of Turkey because he was also Erdogan’s son-in-law.
“I
briefed Pompeo and Mnuchin on this new ‘son-in-law channel’ and they both
exploded. Pompeo was furious, Bolton writes, “because this was one more example
of Kushner’s doing international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing
(along with the never quite ready Middle East peace plan.)”
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 learned 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.
In
November 2018, Trump came under fire for writing an unfettered defense of Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, littered with exclamation points, over the killing
of Washington Post columnist Jamaal Khashoggi. But according to Bolton’s
book, the main goal of the missive was to take away attention from a story
about Ivanka Trump using her personal email for government business.
“This
will divert from Ivanka,” Trump said, according to Bolton’s book. “If I read
the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”
He
repeatedly describes Trump lashing out at military leaders, demanding to
withdraw troops from the Middle East and all around the world — from Africa to
Europe to the Middle East. “I want to get out of everything,” Trump said during
a meeting at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, according to Bolton, as military
leaders pressed him to take more nuanced positions.
At
another point, arguing in 2018 with Mattis, Trump told him that Russia should
take care of the Islamic State terrorist group.
“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.”
Trump
repeatedly told Mattis that he had been given a chance but had failed.
“I
gave you what you asked for: Unlimited authority, no holds barred. You’re
losing. You’re getting your ass kicked. You failed,” Trump says.
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 U.S. sanctions that
eventually had to be waived, per Bolton’s book.
When
Bolton recounts the Trump and Kim summit in Singapore, the first summit of the U.S.
and North Korean leaders in history, Bolton castigates Trump’s diplomatic
efforts, saying the president cared little for the details of the
denuclearization effort and saw it merely as “an exercise in publicity.”
He
describes it extensively — including what Kim and his advisers say, and what
Trump and his advisers say in return, giving a fly-on-the-wall account of a
historic event.
“Trump
told … me he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press
conference to declare victory and then get out of town,” Bolton wrote.
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 a visit to North Korea. Trump originally used the term
“Rocket Man” to criticize the North Korean leader but subsequently tried to
convince Kim that it was a term of affection.
“Trump
didn’t seem to realize 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.”
John Hudson, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Tom Hamburger contributed
to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment