Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton is set to claim in a bombshell book that the president has committed “Ukraine-like transgressions” across his entire foreign policy, far beyond the alleged misconduct he was impeached for.
He will also describe his attempts and those by “others in the administration to raise alarms about them”, according to a press release on Friday about the forthcoming memoir.
Bolton, a staunch conservative who previously served as Republican president George W Bush’s hawkish ambassador to the United Nations, will criticize the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry for focusing solely on Trump’s alleged bid to pressure the leader of Ukraine into damaging the reputation of Trump’s election opponent Joe Biden, while leaving out much wider accusations of similar wrongdoing.
Trump was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate in his impeachment trial early in 2020.
Bolton will argue in his book, The Room Where It Happened, that the Democrat-led House of Representatives committed “impeachment malpractice” by impeaching Trump over his Ukraine dealings when, it is suggested in the book, the president had committed other “Ukraine-like transgressions”.
The press release for the book teases that Bolton will describe the transgressions.
New York publishers Simon & Schuster boasted: “This is the book Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read.”
The White House has fought to block the book, claiming in January that it contained classified information. The book is now due out on 23 June.
Bolton was ousted last September after months of disagreement over America’s foreign policy approach, especially Trump’s freewheeling ways, amid revelations of searing internal divisions within Trump’s inner circle. Trump said he had “disagreed strongly” with Bolton, who claimed he was in the process of resigning when Trump moved to fire him.
According to the release on Friday, the new book “argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy – and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the administration to raise alarms about them”.
Critics will probably pounce on Bolton for not publicly raising concerns about these “transgressions” while they were occurring – and for later refusing to testify to the House about them. Bolton refused to provide a deposition during the impeachment inquiry.
Bolton also criticizes Trump for focusing solely on his chances of re-election as he made major policy decisions. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” he writes.
