Bolton bombshell: Trump willing to halt criminal investigations as ‘favor to dictators’

Former US national security adviser John Bolton has said in his new book that President Donald Trump had expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations as “favor to dictators he liked”.

According to excerpts from the tell-all memoir, which is due to be published later this month, Trump sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.

Bolton describes a pattern of corruption in which Trump routinely attempts to use the US leverage 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 US attorney general, William Barr.

The former aide, who was fired by Trump last September over policy differences, also said Trump urged China’s President Xi Jinping to build concentration camps for Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslims in Xinjiang province.

Trump gave Xi the green light in the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, Bolton said.

Bolton also said Trump pleaded with the Chinese president to help him get re-elected by buying buy more US farm products.

At another meeting during last year's G-20 Summit in Osaka, Trump "stressed the importance of increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome," adding that he "would print Trump's exact words, but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."

At the G-20 summit, Bolton writes that Trump extolled Xi as the greatest leader in China’s history, characterizing Trump's interactions with Xi as "adlibbed," driven by political ambition rather than policy.

The Trump administration applied for an emergency temporary restraining order against Bolton on Wednesday to stop the book’s publication, claiming it contains classified information.

Bolton’s publisher called the justice department’s restraining order “a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility. Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.’’

In the book, Bolton says the House impeachment inquiry should have gone far beyond Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government for political gain.

Bolton accused the House Democrats who impeached Trump of committing “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons.

Trump had made US military aid conditional on Ukraine handed over compromising information on his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Bolton’s book also underscored Trump’s lack of enough knowledge about the world, saying the US president did not know Finland was not part of Russia, or Britain had nuclear weapons of its own, for example.

The book describes the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo as mocking the US president behind his back at a 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, saying “Trump is so full of shit.”

According to Bolton, Pompeo described the initiative to charm the North Korean leader from early on as having “zero probability of success”.

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