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Trump asked China’s Xi for re-election help, claims Bolton
WASHINGTON, June 18, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – 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.
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.
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.
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.
When asked about the claims in the book on Thursday, China said it
has “always pursued the principle of non-interference in internal
affairs.”
“We have no intention to and will not interfere in US internal
politics and elections,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
In a sign of Trump’s anger over the memoir, the Justice Department
filed an emergency order late Wednesday seeking to halt publication,
the second time in as many days it has tried to block the book.
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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.
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,” Trump later tweeted.
In the released excerpts Bolton said 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.
– ‘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.
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.
– 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.”
Several behind-the-scenes books have emerged in recent years
alleging damning Trump details, but Bolton is the highest-ranking
official to write one.
Trump has sought to halt the books, but constitutional experts told
AFP it would be unlikely courts would block their publication.
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