Appearing for an interview on CNN Thursday, National Security Adviser John Bolton contradicted Donald Trump’s claim that didn’t know what a “burner phone” was, telling the network that his former boss was lying and that the use of the untraceable devices was “deliberate.”
Bolton told host Brianna Keilar he heard the ex-president use the words “burner phones a number of times… It was a term he kind of liked. He would say, ‘they have these burner phones.’ The former president’s acquaintance with the truth is often very casual. This is a good example of it.”
Bolton also said that Trump would avoid making calls from the Oval Office, choosing instead other areas within the White House to make his calls.
“I certainly spoke to him up there many times on regular phones, on the secure phones or regular landline,” he said. “What else he was doing up there, I certainly don’t know.
The former Trump official insisted that if there were no call logs during the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol, then it was a “deliberate” move because he knows people who spoke to Trump during that time.
“Well, I think it’s very hard to believe that anybody redid the log to purge information from it,” Bolton said. “These are routinely made, that is not subject to high-level scrutiny. So, if there was interference with it, it would be great extraordinary. I think it means the former president made a deliberate effort not to use Oval Office phones or government phones during that period. I don’t know how else to explain it. We know from what others said, he did have phone conversations with them that day that are not outside the gap period.”
Bolton added: “I don’t know what other explanation would make any sense, frankly. When asked why, he said, frankly, “because he didn’t want a record of the calls. And what he was saying in those calls is anybody’s guess. Some people say they have received calls, they have described what the subject of the conversation was. So we know he was making calls. What other calls he made. At this point, we don’t know.”
Watch the interview below:
