Donald Trump pleaded with China’s leader Xi Jinping for help to win re-election in 2020, the US president’s former national security advisor John Bolton writes in an explosive new behind-the-scenes book, according to excerpts published Wednesday. Trump ex-aide Bolton claims a whole host of impeachable offences committed by US President Donald Trump in his new book which is set to published soon when Trump is in the thick of the Presidential reelection race.
Breaking via WaPo: Trump asked China's Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S. election, telling Xi last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects, according to John Bolton. https://t.co/hNN7G7ZLUu
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 17, 2020
Bolton alleges in a blistering critique that Trump’s focus on winning a second term was the driving principle of his foreign policy, and that top aides routinely disparaged the Republican leader for his ignorance of basic geopolitical facts.
Trump ex-aide Bolton claims Trump asked Xi for help in reelection
In excerpts published by The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Bolton also claims Trump repeatedly showed a readiness to overlook Chinese human rights abuses — most strikingly telling Xi the mass internment of Uighur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do.”
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes of the real estate magnate-turned-president, who was impeached in December for seeking dirt from Ukraine on his 2020 Democratic election rival Joe Biden.
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In a key meeting with Xi last June, Trump “stunningly turned the conversation to the US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton claims in his upcoming tell-all.
Bolton writes that Trump stressed the importance of US farmers and how “increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat” could impact the US electoral outcome.
Fissures in the administration over North Korea
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, outwardly one of Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters, secretly disparaged the president and doubted his North Korea diplomacy, former top aide John Bolton says.
Bolton details what he says were private interactions with Pompeo. According to an excerpt published Wednesday by The New York Times, Pompeo slipped a note to Bolton during Trump’s historic first meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, saying of the president, “He is so full of shit.”
Pompeo traveled four times to North Korea in 2018 to jumpstart diplomacy for Trump, who has hailed his own efforts as worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Read more: North Korea denounces US only two years after Singapore summit
But Bolton wrote that Pompeo, a month after the Singapore summit in June 2018, dismissed Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, saying it had “zero probability of success,” according to the Times report.
Bolton also related how Pompeo showed skepticism when, while visiting the Middle East in 2018, he listened in on a call between Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has encouraged diplomacy with the North.
Pompeo told Bolton he was “having a cardiac arrest in Saudi Arabia,” according to a book excerpt published by The Washington Post.
It said that Trump also grew fixated on getting Pompeo to deliver an Elton John CD to Kim, a nod to Trump’s earlier mockery of the North Korean leader as “Little Rocket Man.”
Aides to Pompeo, who was meeting a senior Chinese leader in Hawaii on Wednesday, did not immediately comment on the book.
Widely seen as having presidential ambitions of his own, Pompeo recently declined entreaties from his Republican Party to seek a Senate seat in his home state of Kansas, choosing to stay on as the top US diplomat.
Trump rushes to enforce gag order on new book
In a sign of Trump’s anger over the memoir, the Justice Department filed an emergency order late Wednesday seeking a halt to publication, the second time in as many days it has tried to block the book.
Arguing that Bolton failed to allow completion of vetting of the book as required, the department urged the court to take action to “prevent the harm to national security that will result if his manuscript is published to the world.”
Bolton “broke the law” by divulging “highly classified information,” Trump said in a late Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
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He also derided his former advisor, a veteran Washington insider, as “washed up,” and mocked Bolton’s past support for the US war in Iraq.
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
“Wacko John Bolton’s ‘exceedingly tedious’ (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories,” Trump later tweeted.
“A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!”
In the released excerpts Bolton said that by intervening in cases involving major firms in China and Turkey, Trump appeared to “give personal favors to dictators he liked.”
He describes “obstruction of justice as a way of life” in the White House, and says he reported his concerns to Attorney General William Barr.
Trump ex-aide Bolton claims Trump is ‘morally repugnant’
The bombshell book, “The Room Where It Happened,” is due for release next Tuesday, in the thick of a presidential campaign against Democrat Biden.
The former vice president said Bolton’s revelations show Trump “sold out the American people to protect his political future.”
“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values.”
The conservative Bolton, himself a controversial figure in US politics, spent 17 turbulent months in the White House before resigning last September.
He declined to testify during the December impeachment process in the House of Representatives, then said in January he would testify in the Senate trial if he were issued a subpoena.
Read more: Campaign of Revenge: Trump fires top witnesses of Impeachment
Senate Republicans blocked such an effort by Democrats.
Bolton did not explicitly say whether Trump’s newly revealed actions amounted to impeachable conduct, but argued that the House should have investigated them.
He also said Democrats committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to “the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests.”
Had they looked more widely, Democrats might have persuaded Republicans and other Americans that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been perpetrated, he wrote.
Donald Trump: the ‘world’s most dangerous man’?
Bolton depicts a chaotic White House in which even seemingly loyal top aides mocked the president — while Trump himself allegedly ignores basic facts such as Finland being distinct from Russia.
During Trump’s 2018 summit with North Korea’s leader, according to excerpts, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Bolton a note maligning the president, saying “He is so full of shit.”
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Several behind-the-scenes books have emerged in recent years alleging damning Trump details, but Bolton is the highest-ranking official to write one.
The president’s niece, Mary Trump, is also set to release her memoir, featuring the scathing title “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” on July 28.
Trump has sought to halt the books, but constitutional experts opined that it would be unlikely courts would block their publication.
AFP with additional input by GVS News Desk
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