John Bolton details a troubling and shocking series of allegations in a new book about his tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, alleging Trump requested Chinese help to win the 2020 election, that the President argued Venezuela is part of the US, that he casually offered to intervene in the criminal justice system for foreign leaders and that his own senior officials mocked him behind his back.
WashingtonJohn Bolton details a troubling and shocking series of allegations in a new book about his tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, alleging Trump requested Chinese help to win the 2020 election, that the President argued Venezuela is part of the US, that he casually offered to intervene in the criminal justice system for foreign leaders and that his own senior officials mocked him behind his back.
Bolton refused to testify during Trump’s impeachment inquiry, choosing instead to save his disclosures for the book that has already vaulted to Amazon’s best seller list, though he later said he would testify in the impeachment trial if subpoenaed by the Senate. He argues in the book that lawmakers should have broadened impeachment inquiries to examine a raft of ways Trump sought to bend the law.
CNN obtained a copy of the book before its June 23 release, which the White House is scrambling furiously to stop. Here are some of the things we’ve learned from Bolton’s tell-all about his former boss:
Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping for help in getting reelected
Bolton described a conversation between the two world leaders at the June 2019 G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, where Trump told Xi that Midwestern farmers were key to his reelection in November 2020. Trump urged Xi to buoy his political fortunes by buying American agricultural products, linking a promise to waive some tariffs on China in exchange. Trump « stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome, » Bolton wrote.
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Bolton also says that it’s hard for him to think of a single decision Trump made during his stint at the White House « that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations. »
Trump had no problem with China’s concentration camps
Bolton describes several instances where Trump waffles on China-related issues after conversations with Xi, notably on the mass concentration camps Beijing was using to imprison and « re-educate » Uyghur Muslims. Bolton writes that according to the US interpreter in the room during a conversation between Xi and Trump at the G-20 meeting in June 2019, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was « exactly the right thing to do. »
Bolton adds that Trump didn’t want to sanction China for their crackdown on the Muslim minority because of ongoing trade negotiations. « Religious repression in China was also not on Trump’s agenda; whether it was the Catholic Church or Falun Gong, it didn’t register, » Bolton writes.
Pompeo, famously loyal to the President, may have trash-talked him
Bolton describes a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un in which the North Korean despot blamed troubled relations between his country and the US on the actions of prior administrations.
