The New York Times and The Washington Post obtained copies of former National Security Advisor John Bolton book, ‘The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,’ which the Trump administration had tried to block from bookstores with a week to go before its release, filing a Tuesday lawsuit. The book lists series of claims by Blon linked to China and other topics. According to the new book, U.S President Donald Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favours to dictators he liked
Bolton’s bombshell book includes shocking new claims of alleged misconduct by President Trump –including that Trump pleaded with Chinese President Xi Jinping to boost U.S. food purchases, describing it in terms of his own election. Trump regularly touts a deal to pause the China trade war as one of his chief accomplishments.
In the book, Bolton recounts a meeting between President Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a G20 meeting in Japan last year. The US president “stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Mr Bolton writes.”He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”According to Bolton, Mr Trump told China’s leader that Americans were keen for him to make the constitutional changes needed for him to serve more than two terms.
On the Turkish side, Trump offered help to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018 in a US investigation into a Turkish company over potential violations of Iranian sanctions. The US president is said to have agreed to “take care of things” and that the prosecutors involved were “Obama people”.
In the book, Bolton also supports Democrats’ accusations that President Trump wanted to withhold military assistance to Ukraine to compel its government into investigating his rival Joe Biden. The claim sparked impeachment efforts against Mr Trump.
However, he criticises the Democrats in his book, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by just focusing on Ukraine. He argues that if they had broadened the investigation more Americans would have been persuaded that President Trump had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanours” necessary to be removed from office.
Bolton goes on with the list of claims as he said that Trump didn’t know the UK was a nuclear power. Britain was the third country after the US and the Soviet Union to test an atomic device, in 1952. But that the UK is part of the small club of nuclear-armed states appears to have been news to President Trump.
One extract told of a 2018 meeting with then UK Prime Minister Theresa May in which an official referred to Britain as a nuclear power. Mr Trump is said to have replied: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?
The list by Bolton extends to Russia, in his book he mentions that there were other gaps in President Trump’s knowledge.
Before a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Finnish capital Helsinki, he is said to have asked if Finland was “kind of a satellite of Russia”.
Trump was also a steadfast critic of the Nato military bloc, calling on other members to increase their spending.
Despite this, the US remained a member, but Mr Bolton says that at a 2018 Nato summit Mr Trump had decided to quit.
“We will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid],” the president said, according to Mr Bolton.
Another dark passage recounts one of Trump’s many defences of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi as an effort to distract attention from Ivanka Trump using personal email. The president’s daughter, a White House advisor, was under fire for using the personal account for some government business – a sensitive matter given Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton.
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