Democrats and Republicans react to John Bolton's bombshell book on Trump
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton has managed to anger both sides of the political divide ahead of the release of his new book, which contains potentially damaging accusations about President Trump.
Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney claimed Friday that former national security adviser John Bolton's book contains portions that are "factually false," but could not explain how those passages were also deemed to contain classified information.
"The excerpts that I've seen have been factually false and it's very likely or possible that the stuff that we've not seen is classified," Mulvaney told CNN's Jim Sciutto on "New Day."
Mulvaney said he has not read Bolton's new book, "In the Room Where it Happened" in full, but during the interview he refuted multiple claims made by Bolton in excerpts that have been publicized.
Mulvaney, however, could not answer when asked by CNN why he would call portions of the book false, when the White House and National Security Council reviewer Ellen Knight insisted certain passages be paraphrased because they contained classified information.
"The classification process is done by the National Security Council lawyers and I don't understand and don't pretend to understand, I'm not involved in the process for classifying information, as to what is classified and what is not, and what level of classification it gets," Mulvaney told CNN.
Bolton, who was national security adviser from March 2018 to September, claims in his book that President Donald Trump personally asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 US presidential election, according to a copy of the book obtained by CNN Wednesday.
At a meeting during last year's G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, Bolton writes that Trump "stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome," adding that he "would print Trump's exact words, but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."
Asked about this, Mulvaney, who said he attended the Trump-Xi meeting, dismissed Bolton's description of what occurred as the former adviser putting "his whimsical spin on what actually happened at the meeting."
Mulvaney said Trump did discuss China buying more US agriculture products, which he admitted would "be good for the country and thus good" for the President's reelection chances.
"But to put those two factually true statements together to make it look like the President is begging China for inappropriate help, that's bizarre," he said.
Mulvaney said neither he nor a dozen others who were at the meeting recalled anything inappropriate.
In his book, Bolton also claims that when Xi told Trump last year that China was building concentration camps for the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims, Trump said Xi should go ahead building the camps, "which he thought was exactly the right thing to do."
The US State Department estimates that more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups have been detained by the Chinese government in internment camps, where they are reportedly "subjected to torture, cruel and inhumane treatment such as physical and sexual abuse, forced labor and death."
Mulvaney told CNN on Friday, "I don't know anything about that conversation, because I wasn't in the room when that conversation took place, and neither was John Bolton."
A former congressman from South Carolina, Mulvaney was tapped at the start of the Trump administration to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget. Trump then made Mulvaney his acting chief of staff, before the President replaced him in March.
Liberals like "The View" co-host Joy Behar and "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah blasted Bolton for taking so long to speak out, suggesting that he betrayed the country by waiting until he could make money off his claims.
"There were plenty of opportunities," Behar said Thursday, "for Bolton to speak out back in January during the impeachment trial ... a lot of people, myself included, feel like he shirked his responsibilities as a public servant and American so that he could make a buck by writing this book."
Noah also blasted Bolton's book as "b------t" and argued he could have testified during the Senate's impeachment trial.
"Who sees their country in terrible danger from an unhinged president and goes, 'I need to warn the people! Chapter one... I was born on a bright autumn day in 1948...?'” he asked, while imitating someone typing.
Should we take the book seriously?
— Heidi Heitkamp (@HeitkampHeidi) June 19, 2020
"You could certainly question & I think should question John Bolton's patriotism in withholding this information during an impeachment proceeding. But that doesn't necessarily detract from the seriousness of what he alleges." — @AdamSchiff pic.twitter.com/9qY2shSQOO
NBC "Late Night" host Seth Myers similarly adressed Bolton: "You’re like a guy who sees his neighbor’s house on fire and instead of calling 9-1-1, writes a book called, 'Hey, that house is on fire!'"
Not to be outdone, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., -- who led the impeachment inquiry against President Trump -- told "CBS This Morning" Thursday that , he said people should "question John Bolton's patriotism. in withholding this information during an impeachment proceeding."
An offer of firsthand evidence on the Ukraine matter.
ReplyDeleteThe book offers firsthand evidence that Mr. Trump linked his suspension of $391 million in security aid for Ukraine to his demands that Ukraine publicly announce investigations into supposed wrongdoing by Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — the heart of the impeachment case against the president.
If Mr. Bolton’s account is to be believed, it means that Mr. 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. Mr. Bolton, by contrast, was in the room.
Mr. Bolton says that he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. 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 Russia-sponsored forces. The critical meeting took place on Aug. 20 when, 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,” referring to Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Bolton otherwise confirms testimony offered by his former Russia adviser, Fiona Hill, that he objected to the “drug deal” being cooked up by Mr. Trump’s associates to force Ukraine to help and that he called Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer who was hip deep in the affair, “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.” He writes that he suspected that Mr. Giuliani had personal business interests at stake and adds that he had the matter reported to the White House Counsel’s Office.
“I thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Was it a factor in my later resignation? Yes, but as one of many ‘straws’ that contributed to my departure.”
Explaining a lack of testimony, and placing blame on Democrats.
ReplyDeleteAs the book nears publication and details spill out, many congressional Democrats quickly assailed Mr. Bolton for not telling his story during the impeachment proceedings and instead saving it for his $2 million book.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump over the Ukraine matter, Mr. 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 Mr. Bolton was correct, it would not be enough in their minds to justify making Mr. Trump the first president in American history convicted and removed from office.
Mr. Bolton blames House Democrats for being in a rush rather than waiting for the court system to rule on whether witnesses like him should testify, and he faults them for narrowing their inquiry to just the Ukraine matter rather than building a broader case with more examples of misconduct by the president.
“Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome,” he writes.
Singling out episodes of “obstruction of justice as a way of life.”
ReplyDeleteThe other episodes that Mr. Bolton says the House should have investigated include Mr. Trump’s willingness to intervene in Justice Department investigations against foreign companies to “give personal favors to dictators he liked.” Mr. 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 American sanctions on Iran. At a side encounter during a Buenos Aires summit meeting in late 2018, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey handed Mr. 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 Mr. Erdogan “he would take care of things.”
Attorney General William P. Barr later spent months trying to negotiate a settlement with the bank, but that came to an end in October, after Mr. Bolton left office, when the Justice Department charged Halkbank in a six-count indictment.
Mr. Bolton also mentions ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications giant that was convicted of evading sanctions on Iran and North Korea and then faced new penalties for further violations during its follow-up consent decree. During a conversation on trade with President Xi Jinping of China, Mr. Trump offered to lighten the penalties.
Delete“Xi replied that if that were done, he would owe Trump a favor and Trump immediately responded he was doing this because of Xi,” Mr. Bolton writes. He called himself “appalled” and “stunned” by the idea of intervening in a criminal investigation to let a sanctions buster off the hook. In the end, at Mr. Trump’s behest, the Justice Department accepted a $1 billion fine and lifted a seven-year ban on buying American products, an act of lenience that saved the company from going out of business.
A new allegation in the book accuses Mr. Trump of “pleading” with Mr. Xi to help him win re-election by buying American agricultural products, which would help the president in farm states. Mr. Trump did not deny it when asked about the matter on Wednesday night by Sean Hannity on Fox News, but Robert Lighthizer, his trade representative, did on his behalf earlier in the day, saying it was not true.
Describing a toxic environment inside the administration.
ReplyDeleteOver a long career in and out of Republican administrations in Washington, Mr. Bolton has rarely shied from giving his opinions, usually born of strong conservative national security convictions that have made him one of the capital’s most outspoken hawks advocating the use of military power and sanctions.
While he agreed with Mr. Trump on issues like getting out of the nuclear accord with Iran, he found himself repeatedly trying to stop the president from making concessions to other rogue states or making an ill-considered peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan while pushing for a more robust use of force against outliers like Iran or Syria. He considered Mr. Trump’s diplomacy to be folly.
To Mr. Bolton, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.” Mr. Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir V. 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.”
Mr. 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.
When Mr. Bolton took over as national security adviser in 2018, John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, disparaged the departing adviser, H.R. McMaster, by saying, “The president hasn’t had a national security adviser in the past year and he needs one.” Mr. Pompeo, the book says, disparaged Nikki R. Haley, then the ambassador to the United Nations, calling her “light as a feather.”
Battling over what is deemed classified information.
ReplyDeleteThe Justice Department has gone to court to stop the book from being published, arguing that it has classified information in it and that it was not cleared by a prepublication review required of former government officials like Mr. Bolton.
In fact, according to his lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, Mr. Bolton participated in an extensive back-and-forth over the book and agreed to all of the revisions mandated by the career official who reviewed it or came up with acceptable alternatives. Only when the review was over did another official, Michael J. Ellis, a political appointee, step in to review it all over again at the instruction of Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Bolton’s successor as national security adviser.
If there is classified information still in the book, it is hard to figure out what it might be. There are not references to secret intelligence programs or espionage sources and methods. But Mr. Trump insisted this week that every conversation with him was “highly classified” and therefore could not be disclosed, an assertion that goes far beyond tradition.
In his epilogue, Mr. Bolton says that in a few cases, “I was prevented from conveying information that I thought was not properly classifiable, since it revealed information that can only be described as embarrassing to Trump or as indicative of possible impermissible behavior.” One example is the direct quote of what Mr. Trump said to Mr. Xi about helping him win re-election.
For the most part, though, Mr. Bolton explains in the epilogue that the career official who reviewed the book merely made him take quotation marks off things that the president said and otherwise generally left them in. And so Mr. Bolton offers a guide to readers: “In some cases, just put your own quotation marks around the relevant passages; you won’t go far wrong.”