Trump attempted to use military aid to pressure Ukraine on political investigations, says Bolton

For months, as the nation was convulsed by the impeachment of Donald Trump, his critics held out hope that the congressional proceedings would unearth a high-level witness with first-person testimony about Mr Trump’s efforts to use his office to try to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that could bolster him politically.

Now, more than four months after Mr Trump was acquitted by a Republican-led Senate, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton has emerged with just such an account in his new book: The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.

In it, Mr Bolton asserts that the delay in releasing $400m (£320.2m) in security assistance for Ukraine last summer was indeed an attempt by the president to get the foreign country to provide damaging material about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former vice president Joe Biden.

The former national security adviser cites personal conversations in which he describes a quid pro quo that Mr Trump long denied, including an August meeting in which Mr Bolton alleges that Mr Trump made the bargain explicit.

“He said he wasn’t in favour of sending them anything until all Russia-investigation material related to Ms Clinton and Mr Biden had been turned over,” Mr Bolton writes.

In an interview on Wednesday night with The Wall Street Journal, Mr Trump called his former national security adviser “a liar”, and added that “everybody in the White House hated John Bolton”.

The administration has said the memoir contains classified material, which Mr Bolton’s attorney disputes.

On Wednesday night, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to issue an emergency order to block the book’s publication.

During the impeachment process, lower-level officials testified that they believed Mr Trump had sought to condition the security dollars on Ukrainian willingness to provide politically useful information about his opponents. In a 25 July phone call, Mr Trump asked the country’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open investigations into Mr Biden and the 2016 election.

But Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky did not discuss the financial assistance on the call, and the White House has denied that the president connected the two issues. Many Senate Republicans argued that House impeachment managers failed to prove the case because numerous witnesses acknowledged they had not personally heard Mr Trump say the two were linked.

The remarkable after-the-fact account bolstering the core of the impeachment case will likely be cold comfort to Democrats who listened to Mr Trump’s defence team and Hill Republicans repeatedly dismiss hours of testimony, arguing that few of the witnesses who agreed to participate had spoken directly to Mr Trump about Ukraine.

They have accused Mr Bolton of withholding an account crucial to the public’s interest and instead saving it for a moneymaking memoir.

“Bolton’s staff were asked to testify before the House to Trump’s abuses, and did. They had a lot to lose and showed real courage,” House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led the impeachment inquiry, tweeted on Wednesday. “When Bolton was asked, he refused and said he’d sue if subpoenaed. Instead, he saved it for a book. Bolton may be an author, but he’s no patriot.”

For his part, Mr Bolton is silent on whether he believes Mr Trump’s actions towards Ukraine merited impeachment – and pointedly critical of how Democrats handled an impeachment process that he refused to assist.

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But he writes that he found Mr Trump’s actions “deeply disturbing” and potentially illegal.

Mr Bolton portrays a president entirely captive to “conspiracy fantasies” about Ukraine spun by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and whose approach towards a US ally, according to Mr Bolton, was entirely motivated by his own political fortunes instead of the national interest.

“I thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally and unacceptable as presidential behaviour,” Mr Bolton writes.

In an interview, Mr Giuliani said that he had recommended Mr Bolton for his White House post and spoken to him repeatedly while he was in office but that Mr Bolton never told him directly that he was concerned about his activities.

“I don’t think anyone will ever trust him ever again,” Mr Giuliani said.

In the book, Mr Bolton defends his approach to the impeachment proceedings, claiming that Democrats oversaw a rushed, unnecessarily partisan process guided largely by the calendar of the party’s presidential primaries. He blames them for narrowing the focus of the proceedings when what he called “Ukraine-like transgressions” existed across Mr Trump’s foreign policymaking, he said.

Out of respect for the powers of the executive branch, Mr Bolton said he would not testify without a court requiring him to do so, given that Mr Trump and White House lawyers had ordered him not to appear. He blasts House Democrats for not issuing him a subpoena to testify or fully seeking to enforce a subpoena issued to his deputy that he says might have provided legal guidance for top Trump aides.

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As for the Senate, where Republicans chose to call no witnesses at all, he concludes that his account “would have made no significant difference” in Mr Trump’s acquittal – blaming Democrats’ “impeachment malpractice” for poisoning the process, rather than the Republicans who never asked for his testimony.

He writes that he wanted to tell his story in his own way and was determined to bide his time to do it.

“I believed, as the line in Hamilton goes, that: ‘I am not throwing away my shot’, especially not to please the howling press, the howling advocates of impeachment or Trump’s howling defenders,” he writes.

Still, while Mr Bolton refused to defy the White House and testify without a court order, he nevertheless proceeded with publication of his book over Mr Trump’s vehement opposition.

The president this week threatened that Mr Bolton would have “criminal problems” if he released his memoir, saying it contains classified material. Mr Bolton’s attorney has denied that.

The basics of Mr Bolton’s account about Ukraine have been known since January, when the New York Times published key details, citing people who had reviewed the book manuscript.

But the book itself provides dramatic new details and quotes, suggesting that nearly all of Mr Trump’s top aides knew why the president was withholding the military dollars.

Mr Bolton writes that Mr Trump had always been hostile to Ukraine, perceiving it as a roadblock to his desire for better relations with Moscow and a troublesome irritant best handled by Europe instead of the United States.

He describes Mr Trump as growing increasingly incensed by Ukraine in spring 2019, spun up by Mr Giuliani to believe that the foreign country was working with Democrats against him.

Mr Bolton writes that on 8 May, he was summoned to the Oval Office, where Mr Trump was meeting with Mr Giuliani, then-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipollone. The group was discussing Mr Giuliani’s desire to meet with Mr Zelensky to discuss Ukrainian investigations into Ms Clinton and the 2016 election, as well as Mr Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

“Even after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the multiple conspiracy theories at work,” Mr Bolton writes. He says Mr Trump came to conclude, without evidence, that Ukraine rather than Russia had been behind cyber hacks of Democratic officials in 2016.

During the May meeting, Mr Bolton writes, Mr Trump ordered him to call Mr Zelensky and ask him to meet with Mr Giuliani – a startling intermingling of Mr Trump’s personal agenda with the work of government officials.

Mr Bolton ignored the instruction, he wrote, and Mr Giuliani ultimately cancelled his planned trip to Kyiv after it was reported by the Times.

Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani have both denied the meeting took place, or that Mr Trump asked Mr Bolton to call the Ukrainian president on Mr Giuliani’s behalf.

Mr Bolton describes Mr Trump’s beliefs about Ukraine as widely known by senior staff, particularly following an Oval Office meeting Mr Trump held with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland and senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., after the group attended Mr Zelensky’s May 2019 inauguration.

Mr Bolton did not attend the meeting but said that his deputy, Charles Kupperman, reported that Mr Trump railed against Ukraine, at one point telling the group: “Ukraine tried to take me down. I’m not fucking interested in helping them” and “I want the fucking DNC server”, using an expletive to refer to a conspiracy theory about a Democratic Party server hacked by Russia that he claimed could be found in Ukraine.

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By the time Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky spoke on 25 July, a phone call that prompted a whistleblower complaint and ultimately the president’s impeachment, Mr Bolton writes that it was clear to him that “the linkage of the military assistance to Giuliani’s fantasies was already baked in”.

Mr Bolton writes that on at least eight occasions, he, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and secretary of defence Mark Esper pressed Mr Trump to release the money, speaking to him either individually or together.

The Pentagon, asked about Mr Bolton’s characterisation on Wednesday afternoon, declined to comment. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr Trump made the reasons for his opposition explicit during a 20 August meeting with Mr Bolton, according to the book, when the president said he would not release the aid to Ukraine until he got information about his political enemies.

Mr Bolton writes that he suspected some of Mr Giuliani’s activities, including his effort to oust the well-respected US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, might have been driven by the interests of Mr Giuliani’s other clients, who were, unlike Mr Trump, paying the former New York mayor.

At one point, Mr Bolton describes meeting with Mr Mulvaney, Mr Cipollone and other White House lawyers, to discuss whether Mr Giuliani had “ethical problems”, given attorney rules that bar using one client relationship to advance the interests of other clients.

Mr Bolton writes that the others determined that Mr Giuliani’s actions were “slimy” but not likely a violation of the rules.

“So much for legal ethics,” he writes.

On Wednesday, Mr Giuliani said that Mr Bolton could easily have come to him with his concerns. “Not a word, not a peep,” he said. “If he’s telling the truth, and he really believes this, I think he’s a complete backstabber.”

Mr Bolton also alerted both Mr Pompeo and attorney general William Barr to his concerns, saying he called Barr on 1 August, a week after Mr Trump told Mr Zelensky by phone that he should work with Mr Barr and Mr Giuliani on investigations of Mr Biden.

Mr Bolton writes that he briefed Mr Barr on the conversation, including Trump’s references to the attorney general. “I suggested he have someone rein Giuliani in before he got completely out of control,” Mr Bolton writes.

Mr Barr has denied learning of the call from Mr Bolton, saying he learned of it only in mid-August.

Mr Bolton writes that Mr Pompeo too was concerned about Mr Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine, telling Mr Bolton at one point that there were “no facts to support” Mr Giuliani’s allegations that Ms Yovanovitch was working against Mr Trump’s interests. Still, pressed by Mr Trump, Mr Pompeo abruptly ordered Ms Yovanovitch, a 30-year career diplomat, to leave her post in April.

Mr Bolton insists that his own behind-the-scenes efforts to get Ukraine its financial assistance while working to curb Mr Giuliani’s influence was the most effective way to address Mr Trump’s improper behaviour, rather than confronting the president more directly or resigning in protest over the episode.

In his book, Mr Bolton also confirms two of the most memorable revelations of the impeachment proceedings.

He did tell adviser Fiona Hill that he did not want to be part of any “drug deal” being cooked up by Mr Mulvaney and Mr Sondland regarding Ukraine, he writes.

And he said he warned colleagues that Mr Giuliani was a “hand grenade” likely to blow up the White House, adding that the remark “still sounds right today”.

On Wednesday, Mr Giuliani responded: “If I’m a hand grenade, then he’s an atomic bomb.”

The Washington Post obtained this information from a copy of Mr Bolton’s 592-page memoir, which is set to be released publicly on 23 June. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the contents of the book.

The Washington Post