Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations
as 'favor' to dictators, Bolton book says
Trump pleaded with China’s Xi to help re-election
effort
President urged Xi to build concentration camps for
Muslims
John Bolton: ‘I would print Trump’s exact words but
the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.’
Julian
Borger in Washington
Published
onWed 17 Jun 2020 21.02 BST
Donald
Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favors to
dictators he liked”, according to a new book written by his former national
security adviser John Bolton.
In his
memoir, due to be published later this month, Bolton reports that Trump pleaded
with China’s President Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected by buying more US
agricultural products, according to accounts of his forthcoming memoir.
In his
pursuit of a good personal relationship with Xi, Trump is described as brushing
aside human rights issues, even providing encouragement to the communist leader
to continue to build concentration camps for China’s Muslim Uighur population.
In his
book, which Trump’s justice department has attempted to stop being published,
Bolton argues the House impeachment inquiry should have ranged much further
than just Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government for his own
political gain.
According
to excerpts published by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the
Washington Post, Bolton describes a pattern of corruption in which Trump
routinely attempts to use the leverage of US power on other countries to his
own personal ends.
“The
pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t
accept,” Bolton writes, adding that he took his concerns to the attorney
general, William Barr.
The
anecdote involving Xi is particularly damaging for Trump in the run-up to an
election in which he is trying to position himself as tough on China, and his
opponent, Joe Biden, as being in Beijing’s pocket.
In the
memoir, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton describes a one-on-one meeting
between Trump and Xi on the sidelines of the June 2019 G20 meeting in Japan. Xi
complained to Trump about US critics of China, and Trump suggested a way Xi
could help him defeat his domestic opposition.
“He [Trump]
then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential
election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing
campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes.
“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.”
Reports in
the wake of the G20 meeting suggested that Trump had put pressure on Xi to buy
more US farm produce but Xi had been reluctant to make any commitments.
Trump
emerges in the pages of the book as entirely unconcerned by China’s gross human
rights violations, including the incarceration of over a million Uighurs and
other Muslims in Xinjiang province.
“At the
opening dinner of the Osaka G20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters
present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration
camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton writes, according to an excerpt published in the
Wall Street Journal. “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.”
Trump also
refused to issue a statement commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“That was
15 years ago,” he told Bolton (it was the 30th anniversary). “Who cares about
it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything,” Trump said, according to
Bolton’s account.
Bolton
refused to testify in impeachment proceedings against Trump, where his account
would probably have been the most important piece of evidence put before
Congress, and the veteran diplomat was widely accused of holding back his evidence
for his book, putting personal profit before duty.
Bolton
accuses congressional Democrats of committing “impeachment malpractice” by
limiting the inquiry to the Ukraine affair (making US military aid conditional
on Kyiv handed over compromising information on Biden) and moving too quickly.
Bolton
argues that the inquiry should have looked into Trump’s intervention into US
investigations into Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favour with President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and into the China telecommunications manufacturer
ZTE, with the aim of pleasing Xi.
Bolton’s
book also goes through a litany of what Trump does not know about the world –
that Britain had nuclear weapons of its own, for example, or that Finland was
not part of Russia.
It
describes the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who is unstintingly loyal in
public, as mocking the president behind his back at a 2018 summit with North
Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, slipping Bolton a note about Trump saying: “He is
so full of shit.”
Pompeo
consistently described Trump’s summit diplomacy with Kim as a significant
diplomatic achievement, in the face of deep scepticism from experts. According
to Bolton, Pompeo described the initiative to charm Kim from early on as having
“zero probability of success”.
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