In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes instances when the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump’s loyalists mocked him behind his back.
NY TIMES
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 but for a variety of instances when he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.
Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a 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, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.
Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new accusation by describing how Mr. Trump overtly linked tariff talks with China to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping to buy 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.” Mr. Bolton said that Mr. Trump “stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
[The request for electoral assistance from Xi is 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 Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. ( Trump said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela.) Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.”--Washington Post]
[The request for electoral assistance from Xi is 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 Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. ( Trump said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela.) Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.”--Washington Post]
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 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department went to court on Wednesday for the second time 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.
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.
Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. The president never tired of assailing allied leaders and came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.[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.--Washington Post]
At times, Mr. Trump seemed to almost mimic the authoritarian leaders he appeared to admire. “These people should be executed,” Mr. Trump once said of journalists. “They are scumbags.” When Mr. Xi explained why he was building concentration camps in China, the book says, Mr. Trump “said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.” He repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to prosecute former Secretary of State John F. Kerry for talking with Iran in what he insisted was a violation of the Logan Act. [And Trump once told Xi that Americans were clamoring for him to change constitutional rules to serve more than two terms, according to the book.--Washington Post] ]
In the face of such behavior, even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock Mr. Trump behind his back. During the president’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 shit.” A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”
Washington Post]In the face of such behavior, even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock Mr. Trump behind his back. During the president’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 shit.” A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”
[In the memoir, Bolton describes the president’s advisers as frequently flummoxed by Trump and said a variety 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 dim 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.”
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 his predecessor 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 Venezuela’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 U.S. intelligence agencies over Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“This was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in 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.”
“Has there ever been a presidency like this?” Kelly asks Bolton at one point, after telling Trump that his moves to remove security clearances from political foes such as John Brennan are “Nixonian” and “unpresidential.”
Throughout the book, he describes Trump and top advisers repeatedly slashing each other, lying to each other and maneuvering to gain advantage.
At one point, Bolton says he learned that 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).”
In November 2018, Trump came under fire for writing an unfettered defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, littered with exclamation points, over the killing of Post columnist Jamal 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 from Africa and Europe, too. “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.
Determined to make friends with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump decided that he wanted to give Kim some American gifts — gifts that violated U.S. sanctions that eventually had to be waived, per Bolton’s book.
When Bolton recounts the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, the first summit of 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 a “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.]
NY TIMES
Calling in to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump did not address the content of Mr. Bolton’s book and only attacked him as “a washed-up guy” who “broke the law” by preparing to publish a book that the president claimed had classified information, an assertion Mr. Bolton has denied. As for Mr. Pompeo, the State Department had no comment.
Credit...Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time, Mr. Bolton writes, “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)” after 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 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. An official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush and George W. Bush’s United Nations ambassador, Mr. Bolton has been one of Washington’s 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.
Mr. Bolton used 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 leader, 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 abuse of power for withholding security aid while pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., 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 investigate his political rivals. The Senate went on to acquit Mr. Trump almost entirely along party lines. But Mr. Bolton greatly angered critics of the president for waiting to make his account public until now.
The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and provides firsthand evidence of his own 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 but 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 says 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 Mr. Xi.
Mr. Bolton writes that he raised concerns about both cases with Mr. Barr, who shared them. “Barr said he was very worried about the appearances Trump was creating,” Mr. Bolton writes. Similarly, he recalls, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, “was plainly stunned at Trump’s approach to law enforcement, or lack thereof.”
Mr. Bolton writes that he raised concerns about both cases with Mr. Barr, who shared them. “Barr said he was very worried about the appearances Trump was creating,” Mr. Bolton writes. Similarly, he recalls, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, “was plainly stunned at Trump’s approach to law enforcement, or lack thereof.”
Just as Mr. Trump sought Ukraine’s help against his domestic rivals, he similarly married his own political interests with policy during a meeting with Mr. Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting last summer in Osaka, Japan, according to the book. Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump that unnamed political figures in the United States were trying to start a new cold war with China.
“Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. Bolton does not say these were necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to all of these episodes, but he reported at least some of them to Mr. Barr and Mr. Cipollone. They should have been investigated by the House, Mr. Bolton says, and at the very least they constituted abuses of a president’s duty to put the nation’s interests ahead of 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 guise 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.”
Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.
The moment he cites as the real “turning point” for him in the administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject disappointment, didn’t happen.
In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton, who has always championed what he proudly calls “disproportionate response,” pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in retaliation. You can sense Bolton’s excitement when he describes going home “at about 5:30” for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House “all night.” It’s therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people. “Too many body bags,” Trump told him. “Not proportionate.”
Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do.” In the book, Bolton is vague about the targets themselves, though it was later reported that he wanted one of them to be the Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, killed on Jan. 3 by American airstrikes, four months after Bolton left the administration.
His chapter on Ukraine is weird, circuitous and generally confounding. It’s full of his usual small-bore detail, but on the bigger, more pointed questions, the sentences get windy and conspicuously opaque. He confirms what Fiona Hill [above], a White House aide, recalled him saying to her when she testified at the House impeachment hearings (including his memorable comparison of Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to a “hand grenade”). But Bolton declines to offer anything comparatively vivid in his own book, taking cover in what he depicts as his own bewilderment.
He recalls a meeting in the Oval Office during which Trump said he wanted Giuliani to meet with Ukraine’s then President-Elect Volodymyr Zelensky “to discuss his country’s investigation of either Hillary Clinton’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both.” Yet Bolton — known for what a 2019 profile in The New Yorker called his “tremendous powers of recall” — said it was too much for him to fully understand. “In the various commentaries I heard on these subjects, they always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed.” He resorts to making noises of concern about what he refers to as “the Giuliani theories.”
In an epilogue, Bolton tries to have it multiple ways, saying that while he may have found Trump’s conduct “deeply disturbing,” it was the Democratic-controlled House that was guilty of “impeachment malpractice.” Instead of a “comprehensive investigation,” he sniffs, “they seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment.” He says they should have broadened their inquiry to include Halkbank and ZTE, but then neglects to mention that nothing was stopping him from saying as much, or from testifying if he was so terribly concerned.
“Had I testified,” Bolton intones, “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.” It’s a self-righteous and self-serving sort of fatalism that sounds remarkably similar to the explanation he gave years ago for preemptively signing up for the National Guard in 1970 and thereby avoiding service in Vietnam. “Dying for your country was one thing,” he wrote in his 2007 book “Surrender Is Not an Option, “but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me.”
When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part — a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often. Or maybe it merely reflects an uncomfortable realization that he’s stuck between two incompatible impulses: the desire to appear as courageous as those civil servants who bravely risked their careers to testify before the House; and the desire to appease his fellow Republicans, on whom his own fastidiously managed career most certainly depends. It’s a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about “the intellectually lazy” by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.