John Bolton: Trump Cared More About a "Spaghetti Bowl of Conspiracy Theories" Than Ukraine
Source: Mother Jones/By David Corn
As Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion kills Ukrainian civilians and raises fear of nuclear war, Donald Trump and his minions have repeatedly insisted that this war would have never happened had Trump won a second term.
That, says former ambassador John Bolton, is bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones this week, Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, discussed Trump’s lack of concern for Ukraine during his White House tenure; Trump’s odd relationship with Putin; Bolton’s decision not to testify during the first Trump impeachment; a big secret about Trump that Bolton is not at liberty to fully reveal; and more.
Bolton noted that when he served in the White House, Trump paid “very little attention” to Ukraine “until the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories.
That was the first time he really focused” on Ukraine. By this point, Putin had for years been backing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who were fighting government troops and Ukrainian militias.
Yet Trump was more concerned with the nutty and unfounded notion pushed by right-wing conspiracists that the Democratic National Committee computer servers hacked by Russian cyber-operatives in 2016 were somehow whisked away to Ukraine to cover-up purported Ukrainian intervention in the election. According to Bolton, Trump really believed this Alex Jones-ish crap.
“I had any number of conversations with Trump, with [Rudy] Giuliani, with others about these theories that frankly I never could understand. I couldn’t get to the bottom of them. They didn’t connect with one another. They were based on some guy who told some other guy something that the President was determined to track down.”
Trump’s fixation on this bizarre conspiracy theory and his ravenous desire to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine, Bolton recalled, “made it hard for the rest of us who were concerned about the instability that we saw in Ukraine and eastern Europe generally because of the Russian threat to get anything much done on it.”
He noted that during the NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Trump was close to announcing a US withdrawal from the military alliance. This disrupted the entire meeting and prevented a full discussion of one of the major topics on the agenda: Ukraine.
When Trump looked at Ukraine, he only saw servers, Bidens, and schemes. This, Bolton said, rendered it difficult “to get any focused presidential-level attention to the issue” of Ukraine’s security and its conflict with Russia.
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/...sia-putin/
One thing the story says further in that goes beyond the four-paragraph limit is that Bolton says Trump asked Chinese president Xi Jinping for help in winning the election. Bolton says he'd have used Trump's quote in his book, but it was disallowed.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142884534
Source: Mother Jones/By David Corn
As Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion kills Ukrainian civilians and raises fear of nuclear war, Donald Trump and his minions have repeatedly insisted that this war would have never happened had Trump won a second term.
That, says former ambassador John Bolton, is bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones this week, Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, discussed Trump’s lack of concern for Ukraine during his White House tenure; Trump’s odd relationship with Putin; Bolton’s decision not to testify during the first Trump impeachment; a big secret about Trump that Bolton is not at liberty to fully reveal; and more.
Bolton noted that when he served in the White House, Trump paid “very little attention” to Ukraine “until the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories.
That was the first time he really focused” on Ukraine. By this point, Putin had for years been backing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who were fighting government troops and Ukrainian militias.
Yet Trump was more concerned with the nutty and unfounded notion pushed by right-wing conspiracists that the Democratic National Committee computer servers hacked by Russian cyber-operatives in 2016 were somehow whisked away to Ukraine to cover-up purported Ukrainian intervention in the election. According to Bolton, Trump really believed this Alex Jones-ish crap.
“I had any number of conversations with Trump, with [Rudy] Giuliani, with others about these theories that frankly I never could understand. I couldn’t get to the bottom of them. They didn’t connect with one another. They were based on some guy who told some other guy something that the President was determined to track down.”
Trump’s fixation on this bizarre conspiracy theory and his ravenous desire to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine, Bolton recalled, “made it hard for the rest of us who were concerned about the instability that we saw in Ukraine and eastern Europe generally because of the Russian threat to get anything much done on it.”
He noted that during the NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Trump was close to announcing a US withdrawal from the military alliance. This disrupted the entire meeting and prevented a full discussion of one of the major topics on the agenda: Ukraine.
When Trump looked at Ukraine, he only saw servers, Bidens, and schemes. This, Bolton said, rendered it difficult “to get any focused presidential-level attention to the issue” of Ukraine’s security and its conflict with Russia.
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/...sia-putin/
One thing the story says further in that goes beyond the four-paragraph limit is that Bolton says Trump asked Chinese president Xi Jinping for help in winning the election. Bolton says he'd have used Trump's quote in his book, but it was disallowed.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142884534
