It appears the anti-Trump memoir from former national security adviser John
Bolton is undercutting a bombshell report from The Atlantic that laid out
damning claims against President Trump and his canceled 2018 visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in
France.
and around the bend to The Federalist, which is ready to assert that Bolton
has proved the allegations are false
The one thing Bolton got really angry about, as
Jennifer Szalai
notes in an enjoyably snarky Times review:
the moment he cites as the real “turning point” for him in the
administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject
disappointment, didn’t happen.
In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton,
who has always championed what he proudly calls “disproportionate
response,” pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in
retaliation. You can sense Bolton’s excitement when he describes going
home “at about 5:30” for a change of clothes because he expected to be at
the White House “all night.” It’s therefore an awful shock when Trump
decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning
they would kill as many as 150 people. “Too many body bags,” Trump told
him. “Not proportionate.”
Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and
humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I
ever witnessed any President do.”
Right. "I understand hesitating to say he believes the US intelligence
community because Vladimir Putin says they they gave him a bum rap, but
refusing to kill 150 beastly Persians when you have a chance? That's
irrational!"
I will point out for no good reason except Joanie will like it if she shows up that I knew Shashi Tharoor, now for some years the Congress Party's greatest Twitter exponent, very slightly when he was UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore—he used to play cricket with some friends of mine. This is a picture of John Bolton hating on him and anxious to stop him from becoming UN Secretary General, via DNAIndia.
So fired National Security Advisor Bolton apparently confirms the bribery attempt, not calling it a "drug deal" in his literary effort (man doesn't know a catchy phrase when he sees it, even when he made it up himself); Haberman and Schmidt for NYTimes inform us:
WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.
The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.
"Could undercut" LOL. Could confirm what all the evidence tends to show.
Looks like Bolton dishes on Pompeo (for knowing there was no basis to claims against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and passively allowed Trump to do what he wanted without ever backing her up) and Barr (Bolton asked Barr why Trump had included Barr in his "talk to Rudy" advice to Zelenskyy; Barr has denied having heard about that call until a month later). And Mulvaney (for lying about whether he listened to Trump-Giuliani discussions).
The White House evidently suggesting that it knew Mr. Bolton only for a very short time and maybe he was the coffee boy—and inevitably admitting what he said was true but regretting that he was naughty enough to say so and hang on to the documentation:
In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.
“And by the way, John Bolton is here and we’ve just had a very big successful hit,” Trump said.
As Trump attempted to go on with his talk he was cut off by continued applause and a standing ovation.
“Hey John, that’s pretty good. I didn’t expect that. I’m a little jealous. Are you giving him all the credit?” Trump asked the audience. “You know that means the end of his job."
Unsurprisingly, John Bolton didn't do his job as National Security Adviser, or even seem to know what the job was, according to Brett McGurk, a veteran of the Bush, Obama, and Trump national security teams who resigned in protest last December ("In response, Trump wrote that he did not know McGurk and questioned if McGurk was a 'grandstander'," says Wikipedia) on NPR yesterday morning:
I think two problems with John Bolton's leadership in this job - there is both a process problem - he didn't really run much of a process. He didn't really try to facilitate the Cabinet secretaries to give the president options and advice. But then he had a policy problem because he has a very maximalist view of America's role in the world with a very minimalist president. So you just had all these contradictions from the start. And they really came to a head yesterday....
And I really can't speak to the, you know, the internal dynamics of what it was like between them day to day. But I do know there just - there wasn't a process. And without a process in which the national security adviser is harnessing all the incredible expertise around U.S. government to give fair warning, to give options to the president and to protect our country - that's really what this is about. So protecting our country - most important job in the world. And this chaos is just - it's extremely serious and puts our country at risk.
He seems to have thought he was supposed to be the president's personal opinionist and could safely ignore everybody else's opinions, and since the president found his opinions disagreeable, that wasn't going to get anybody anywhere. Bolton's incomprehension of everything beyond scrambling for personal advantage and calling for one country or another to be bombed is what makes me doubt very strongly that his book will be worth reading. He's an officious, self-serving, bloody-minded fool.
Which doesn't make Trump a good person simply by contrast. Tiresome as it is for people like Lawrence O'Donnell (see Steve M's post) to lionize Bolton just because Bolton is having a fight with Trump, it's even worse when everybody from Glenn Greenwald to NPR's Rachel Martin tries to force the formulation of the Bolton-Trump disagreement in terms of "hawk" vs. "dove" putatively instantiating "right" vs. "left". While Bolton has always been a hawk in the cliché sense to the point of parody, no doubt, his opposition to Trump is better expressed in the terms McGurk used:
MCGURK: Well, I mean, in some - the president is a, at heart - and this is what I talked about, a maximalist foreign policy with a minimalist president. In part, the president doesn't want to be involved in these things. He doesn't want to be much involved around the world.
MARTIN: Doesn't want to be involved in U.S. endeavors around the world or he personally doesn't want to think about them or both?
MCGURK: Well, both.
Trump's opposition to war is that you don't always get what you want (he'd be fine with the Iraq War if we'd "gotten the oil") and it's "tough", involving imagery that makes him uncomfortable. He admires Putin for seizing Crimea, but when he thinks about acquiring Greenland he'd rather just write a check. Plus the problem of having allies, and working with them, which he really can't stand at any price. He loves what he thinks of as diplomacy, but that's just celebrity playdates, from the opening handshake competition to reading his beautiful thank-you note in the afterglow and telling the press that his relationships are very good. Anything like work, and the risk of the other guys thinking he's dumb, just makes him crabby.
Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin in Camp David, MD, 31 August 1978, via Wikipedia.
My take last night, that Trump was not the author and that something was really wrong with the story:
Wonder who wrote this thread. Ghani's visit is real https://t.co/hRjiKqtlIY but Taliban has refused to negotiate with Afghan govt all along. So did they suddenly change their minds, invite themselves to Camp David, and THEN screw the deal??? Weird story. https://t.co/pMkb7koMIY
—error such as we all make from time to time, don't we, I mean after all who among us doesn't have to deal with a loose and stupid general? Or national security adviser with a mustache that looks like a goddamned exotic vacuum cleaner attachment, amirite?
Or, Donald Trump Became President Today, sometime between TV time at 7:15 in the morning
and noon or so, when he was on his way to lunch with Prime Minister Trudeau for the hour-and-a-half of his work day that wasn't devoted to executive time:
Hey, anyone remember the days when the United States couldn't go to war without a congressional declaration?
My reply:
As far as I can tell they aren't exactly any more over than they were in 1964, and this should have been made a lot clearer in the news coverage. The issuing of "plans" doesn't mean anybody is expecting to do anything; just that the military is prepared to do this stupid thing should the "need" arise. The aircraft carrier was going there anyway.
What Bolton-Pompeo would really like is to ratchet up tension to the point where Iran forces will make some kind of actual attack on US interests which would allow US to start up some kind of "emergency" operation, and Congress would find it very hard to deny permission to the ongoing action. This won't in fact happen, I think, because Iran understands the danger very well and will continue to resist temptation. Except for the danger of an accident of some kind, which is certainly real (or of a fake attack, which would be a crazy risk for the fakers).
If you've been having these unpleasant little Gulf of Tonkin flashbacks, or even Remembering the Maine, over the ongoing harshness involving a couple of damaged ships and the float of a war proposal, you're not the only one, and some of our fellow sufferers are in high places, I'm glad to say, according to Helene Cooper and Edward Wong at The Times:
WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration draws up war plans against Iran over what it says are threats to American troops and interests, a senior British military official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that he saw no increased risk from Iran or allied militias in Iraq or Syria.
A few hours later, the United States Central Command issued an unusual rebuke: The remarks from the British official — Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika, who is also the deputy commander of the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State — run “counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region.”
More ominously still,
One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential internal planning, said the new intelligence of an increased Iranian threat was “small stuff” and did not merit the military planning being driven by Mr. Bolton. The official also said the ultimate goal of the yearlong economic sanctions campaign by the Trump administration was to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States.
It doesn't get any more explicit than that. "Yeah, we're trying to get a little war going, so the boss decided to make up some shit."
Or you could look at these signs as welcome signs of Bolton's incompetence, that the British command feels the need to take public issue with him and some White House resister is impelled to speak about it this bluntly. He's like the bad kid in the marshmallow experiment, unable to delay gratification, and he's unable to conceal his designs, unable to manage alliances, unable to command loyalty in his own shop. And his enemies are taking command of Trump, starting with one of Mad Dog Mattis's close confederates, on Fox (which is where the Emperor goes when he needs to find out what he thinks):
Steve Inskeep: We'll just dive right in. But I want to start with the arrest that we learned about last night and that I presume you've known about for some time. What is the message that is sent by the arrest of Meng Wanzhou?
National security adviser John Bolton: Well, I'd rather not get into the specifics of law enforcement matters but, but we've had enormous concern for years about ... in this country about the practice of Chinese firms to use stolen American intellectual property to engage in forced technology transfers and to be used really as arms of the Chinese government's objectives in terms of information technology in particular. So not respecting this particular arrest, but Huawei is one company we've been concerned about, there are others as well. I think this is going be a major subject of the negotiations that President Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed on in Buenos Aires.
She's busted for intellectual property theft? Because the news coverage was pretty clear that the offense she was being held for was to do with her company violating Iran sanctions. Did Bolton not know that? Also, copyright violation isn't generally considered a criminal offense.
Chahar Bagh School, or School of Sultan Hossein's Mother, Isfahan, 19th-century drawing by Pascal Coste, via Wikipedia.
Money quote, for my money, from the press questions after Trump's announcement:
REPORTER: Mr. President, how does this make America safer? How does this make America safer?
TRUMP: Thank you very much. This will make America much safer. Thank you very much.
Oh, that's how. In a much kind of way. Not somewhat or a bit. It's the muchness, stupid.
I didn't listen to the speech, but the way folks were describing his delivery (somebody on Twitter said he was "reading it phonetically") made it sound clear that he'd spent even less time reading it ahead of time than he normally does, which means around zero, and had no idea what it said. Though you can see a dim understanding floating by in a couple of Trumpy interpolations, like
In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime — and it’s a regime of great terror — many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash — a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.
the reference to $1.7 billion as "many billions" and "actual cash" as if there were something particular sinister about that (cash was important to them as it would take some time for international banks to lift the sanctions), or his cute attempt to put himself in Ayatollah Khamenei's place—
And to CNN's Josh Rogin, who was concerned that Bolton was being characterized as a "neocon" which is apparently inaccurate in the terms of the intensive difference-splitting of the American right
He was totally happy to work with neoconservatives in 2003 on the project of destroying Iraq. Disavow him philosophically all you want but forgive the rest of us for not getting excited about these nuances.
Another secret Muslim betrays himself with the tawhid. Photo by Dennis Cook/AP via Breitbart (I won't link them).
.@realDonaldTrump you haven't tweeted about stock market in so long, what's up? Not S&P, that's in negative territory for the year. You did it with your trade war. https://t.co/zgUM1DRv2i
BOLTON: It's not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation.
Quite right in the first place, it's not the case that he accused anybody of mounting a false flag operation (stealing the parties' emails to make it look as if Russians had been stealing the emails, apparently, with no theories on why they would want to do that). He merely didn't not accuse them. It isn't clear to him that they didn't do it, but he isn't saying they did, he's just sayin. The Douthat technique of making you think a potentially slanderous thought without taking responsibility for it.
And then,
Are you actually accusing someone here in this administration of trying -- in the intelligence community of trying to throw something?
BOLTON: We just don't know, but I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.
Quite right in the second place. He couldn't be accusing anybody of doing something when he couldn't say whether it had been done or not, but he fingers the guilty party just in case. Can't say if there was any false flag operation but knows who did it.
And thus Frum is absolutely right: Bolton did not say that the administration had carried out a false flag maneuver, but he made sure that's what we heard all the same. He didn't say it with the most exquisite care you could well apply to not saying something, the insinuating scum.
The other really weird thing Bolton did that hasn't caught so much attention was his explanation of why he thinks it might have been a false flag operation, which is worth looking at in some analytic detail.
