Aspen
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2019
- Messages
- 3,585
- Reaction score
- 1
- Country
- Location
Washington | Donald Trump asked China's President Xi Jinping at a dinner summit meeting last year to help him win the 2020 US election, according to an explosive book excerpt by former national security advisor John Bolton.
At the meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Mr Trump told Mr Xi - as both countries were in the thick of a bruising trade war - that if China increased purchases of US agricultural products, that would help Mr Trump's domestic political prospects.
John Bolton's long-awaited book has Washington agog and Democrats furious after he refused to detail what he knew during Donald Trump's impeachment. Washington Post
Mr Bolton's description of the scene in his pending book The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, will reprise memories of Mr Trump's attempts last year to pressure Ukraine's president to find dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden - an episode that led to Mr Trump's impeachment.
The excerpt, which was published by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) and a separate report of the same account in The Washington Post, details how Mr Xi complained that some, unnamed, American political figures were making a mistake by calling for a new cold war with China.
Mr Trump immediately assumed that Mr Xi meant the Democrats, and he replied "approvingly that there was great hostility to China among Democrats".
China eventually agreed in a so-called "phase one" trade deal with Washington, signed in January, to buy at least $US200 billion ($290 billion) in US goods and services, including a sizeable amount of farm goods such as soybeans.
In exchange, the Trump administration scrapped threats to add to US tariffs on about $US360 billion of Chinese goods.
The 592-page memoir is described by the Post as the "most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and is a longtime contributor to Fox News".
"It portrays Trump as an 'erratic' and 'stunningly uninformed' commander in chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders."
The book is subject to a Justice Department lawsuit filed on Tuesday and the administration claims it contains classified material.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday that Mr Bolton "should know all too well that it is unacceptable to have highly classified information from the government of the United States in a book that will be published".
In other revelations, Mr Bolton claimed Mr Trump encouraged Mr Xi to continue building concentration camps for China's Uighurs.
"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," Mr Bolton wrote in the WSJexcerpt.
"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."
In a separate report by The New York Times, Mr Bolton describes several episodes in which Mr Trump expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations "to, in effect, give personal favours to dictators he liked, citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey".
"The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't accept," Mr Bolton writes, according to the Times. He reported his concerns to Attorney General William Barr.
Mr Bolton also describes a series of unflattering anecdotes about the President and episodes of senior aides making fun of Mr Trump.
According to the Times, the book "is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse".
"Mr Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr Bolton writes.
"He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.
"Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, ‘He is so full of shit.'"
The book is due to be published early next week.
https://www.afr.com/world/north-ame...p-him-win-in-2020-bolton-book-20200618-p553px
At the meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Mr Trump told Mr Xi - as both countries were in the thick of a bruising trade war - that if China increased purchases of US agricultural products, that would help Mr Trump's domestic political prospects.
John Bolton's long-awaited book has Washington agog and Democrats furious after he refused to detail what he knew during Donald Trump's impeachment. Washington Post
Mr Bolton's description of the scene in his pending book The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, will reprise memories of Mr Trump's attempts last year to pressure Ukraine's president to find dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden - an episode that led to Mr Trump's impeachment.
The excerpt, which was published by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) and a separate report of the same account in The Washington Post, details how Mr Xi complained that some, unnamed, American political figures were making a mistake by calling for a new cold war with China.
Mr Trump immediately assumed that Mr Xi meant the Democrats, and he replied "approvingly that there was great hostility to China among Democrats".
China eventually agreed in a so-called "phase one" trade deal with Washington, signed in January, to buy at least $US200 billion ($290 billion) in US goods and services, including a sizeable amount of farm goods such as soybeans.
In exchange, the Trump administration scrapped threats to add to US tariffs on about $US360 billion of Chinese goods.
The 592-page memoir is described by the Post as the "most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and is a longtime contributor to Fox News".
"It portrays Trump as an 'erratic' and 'stunningly uninformed' commander in chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders."
The book is subject to a Justice Department lawsuit filed on Tuesday and the administration claims it contains classified material.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday that Mr Bolton "should know all too well that it is unacceptable to have highly classified information from the government of the United States in a book that will be published".
In other revelations, Mr Bolton claimed Mr Trump encouraged Mr Xi to continue building concentration camps for China's Uighurs.
"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," Mr Bolton wrote in the WSJexcerpt.
"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."
In a separate report by The New York Times, Mr Bolton describes several episodes in which Mr Trump expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations "to, in effect, give personal favours to dictators he liked, citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey".
"The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't accept," Mr Bolton writes, according to the Times. He reported his concerns to Attorney General William Barr.
Mr Bolton also describes a series of unflattering anecdotes about the President and episodes of senior aides making fun of Mr Trump.
According to the Times, the book "is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse".
"Mr Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr Bolton writes.
"He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known.
"Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, ‘He is so full of shit.'"
The book is due to be published early next week.
https://www.afr.com/world/north-ame...p-him-win-in-2020-bolton-book-20200618-p553px
