Politics bolton's book

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...mpeachable-actions-beyond-ukraine/ar-BB15CHwZ


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Bolton Says House Should Have Investigated Trump for Impeachable Actions Beyond Ukraine









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 to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times John R. Bolton was President Trump’s national security adviser for 17 months. Mr. Trump asked if Finland was part of Russia, Mr. Bolton wrote in his new book.
Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed 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, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

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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 filed a last-minute lawsuit against Mr. Bolton 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.

While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, 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.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official.
Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr. Trump’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 s**t.”

A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”

Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time “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)” following 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. A former official under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush who rose to United Nations ambassador, he has been one of the 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.

Like Mr. Tillerson and other officials who went to work for Mr. Trump believing they could manage him, Mr. Bolton agreed to become the president’s third national security adviser in 2018 thinking he understood the risks and limits. But unlike some of the so-called “axis of adults,” as he calls Mr. Tillerson and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who tried to minimize what they saw as the damage of the president’s tenure, Mr. Bolton sought to use 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 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 pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., while withholding security aid, 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 engendered great anger among critics of the president for not making his account public before now.

The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and 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 for 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 said 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 President Xi Jinping.

Mr. Bolton also recounts a discussion at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, last summer at which the president overtly linked policy to his own political fortunes as he asked Mr. Xi to buy a lot of 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. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

Mr. Bolton does not say these are necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to those episodes but he reported them to Mr. Barr and Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. They should have been investigated by the House, he said, and at the very least suggested 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 guide 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.”

 

LOCK HIM UP!!!!! Going to see a lot of dirt come out over the next few months...Bob Woodward is coming out with a new White House book in September...Trump's niece is coming out with a book...next Michael Cohen will probably write one....he's fired a lot of knowledgeable people who will probably all write books now. Trump suing Bolton and his niece sure looks like an admission of guilt to me.

 

tough with barr acting as chief enabler by refusing to investigate and blocking all outside attempts to do the same.
edit: meant to add congressional republicans, especially their senators to enablers list

 

Shit! Wrong Bolton, sorry.

 

Fuck John Bolton but this is gonna be good

 

Why didn't this spineless piece of shit testify in the house? Greedy MFer wanted the book deal.

Either way, I know the GOP fanatics' response. They will dismiss it as #fakenews and ignore it.

 

Fuck Bolton, if he really cared about anything other than book sales he would have spoke up when it counted during the impeachment proceedings. Instead he opted to use it for a book teaser opportunity. He doesn't give a shit about anything other than money so his word can't be trusted. It's funny how every white house employee comes out with a tell all sell out book after they leave. These cockroaches don't deserve a dime in my opinion. The only silver lining is the issues it now causes for their ring leader, but it will and always does amount of nothing when it's all said and done.

 

#PirateBoltonsBook

 

This is why comparing Trump to people like Hitler or Mengele feels both unreasonable and reasonable at the same time. On the one hand, he's obviously not done anything nearly as terrible as people like that, so how can you make that comparison? On the other hand, our system isn't set up to allow him to do things like that--if he had the absolute power to do anything he wanted, are we sure he wouldn't do things like that?

The things he approves of and cheers on makes you wonder.

 

It kind of seems like this administration tried to drain the swamp by flooding it with a horde of Lord Maximus Farquaads and removing all the cuddly ogres that lived there before...

Don't you just wish Princess Fiona still lived there...

 

Trump is so screwed. I mean, it's Bolton, after all.

 

Only person ever to try to drain a swamp by filling it with turds and clogging all the plumbing

 

I know. What a shame.