United States President Donald Trump’s former advisor John Bolton has claimed that Trump ‘pleaded’ with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in 2019 to aid his re-election efforts, in a new tell-all book, The Associated Press reported.
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton reportedly wrote.
The 577-page book, titled The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is set to be released on 23 June, but the US Justice Department is reportedly working to block its release by moving a federal court on Wednesday, 17 June.
AP has procured a copy of the book pre-release, it reported that the book “paints an unvarnished portrait of Trump and his administration.” Most other accounts of the administration that have appeared have been reportedly more flattering of Trump.
Bolton served as Trump’s national security advisor for 17 months and said that the US president’s conversation with Jinping about the 2020 elections were among many that he found “concerning,” adding that such incidents should have been considered by Congress while conducting their impeachment inquiry.
White House Claims Book Contains Classified Information
Bolton wrote that Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.”
The book and its contents have been the subject of a long-standing battle between Bolton and the White House.
The Justice Department has been attempting to reportedly stop the publication of the book, claiming “it still contained highly classified information and that a required review by the National Security Council had not been concluded” even though an official had submitted that it contained no classified material in April.
Bolton reportedly claimed that he had made several revisions to the book during the review process, including rewriting to make it look like something was his opinion and not sensitive information and writing more ‘generally’.
Speaking at a Senate hearing on trade issues on Wednesday, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer reportedly said “that he attended a meeting between Trump and Xi at the Group of 20 nations in Osaka, but he never heard Trump pleading with Xi to buy more agriculture products to ensure he would win reelection.”
Even Bolton’s claims of raising concerns with senior officials were rebutted by Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec who reportedly denied that Attorney General William Barr had ever expressed that Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders were improper.
Trump pandered to China continually, Bolton reportedly claimed,
“At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting, with only interpreters present, Xi explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton wrote. “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton wrote in the book.
Bolton also reportedly claims that “Trump directly tied providing military aid to Ukraine to the country’s willingness to conduct investigations into the Bidens.”
(With inputs from AP)
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