President Trump blasted his former national security adviser, John Bolton, after the contents of Bolton’s upcoming memoir began to air in the press Wednesday night.
The Trump administration has sued Bolton to block the release of the new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” accusing the former top national security official of violating rules against releasing classified material. By the time the Department of Justice had filed the lawsuit on June 16, copies of the book had already been sent to the press to create media buzz ahead of the public release.
Bolton left the administration in September after a falling out with Trump. Both sides claimed that they initiated the split: Trump claimed to have fired Bolton, whereas Bolton claimed that he had first offered to resign.
“Wacko John Bolton’s ‘exceedingly tedious’ … book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, quoting a New York Times review of Bolton’s book.
Wacko John Bolton’s “exceedingly tedious”(New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
“President Bush fired him also. Bolton is incompetent!” Trump followed up, retweeting criticism of Bolton from conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
President Bush fired him also. Bolton is incompetent! https://t.co/vVW3rKiwSz
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy excerpt from Bolton’s memoir on Wednesday. The chapter focuses on the Trump administration’s relations with China and describes Trump’s handling of trade tensions with Beijing as “completely chaotic.”
Throughout Trump’s trade negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Bolton repeatedly accuses Trump of subverting U.S. interests to his political interests.
“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 U.S. national interests. Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security,” Bolton writes.
Bolton also says that Trump disregarded China’s history of human rights abuses and, at one point, encouraged Xi to continue China’s systemic oppression of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group:
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.
The president denied the claims made in Bolton’s book during a Wednesday night interview on Fox News, asserting that “nobody has been tougher on Russia or China than I have.”
“China’s paying us billions of dollars a year. They never gave us 10 cents [before], and [Joe] Biden’s son walked away with a billion and a half dollars to manage, making hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars on it,” according to Fox News.
Trump also said, regarding the lawsuit the DOJ has filed against Bolton, that Bolton “broke the law” and published classified material in the memoir.
“This is highly classified. That’s the highest stage. It’s highly classified information and he did not have approval. That’s come out now very loud and very strong,” Trump said.
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