Former national security adviser John Bolton in his upcoming memoir accuses President Donald Trump of “obstruction of justice as a way of life,” and soliciting foreign election help during a June 29, 2019 meeting with Xi in Osaka, Japan.
“Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed) American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new Cold War with China,” Bolton wrote, according to an excerpt from his book reviewed by The Daily Boulder. “Whether Xi meant to finger the Democrats or some of us sitting on the U.S. side of the table, I don’t know, but Trump immediately assumed that Xi meant the Democrats.”
That’s when the conversation took a troubling turn.
According to Bolton, “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and 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. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”
Bolton also wrote: “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.”
Separately, Bolton said he met with Attorney General Bill Barr concerning Trump’s penchant for giving “personal favors to dictators he liked,” including in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Bolton said.
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton concluded. “Take Trump’s handling of the threats posed by the Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. [Commerce Secretary Wilbur] Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce U.S. regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms’ flouting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most important goal for Chinese ‘companies’ like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the U.S. characterization of their activities).”
The memoir has been expected to claim that Trump’s “transgressions” went well beyond the Ukraine saga that led to his impeachment and alleged that “reelection calculations” drove the president’s major decisions, according to a press release for the book.
“This is the book Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read,” the release stated.
