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. Moreover, Bolton recounted, he couldn’t even follow what Trump was saying about Ukraine and all this supposed skullduggery: “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… And you couldn’t really discuss the subject of Ukraine or the threat posed by Russia…without very quickly the conversation completely diverting to these other subjects.”
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/john-bolton-donald-trump-ukraine-russia-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.
= new reply since forum marked as read
took a minute but I think it's very clever 
LOCK HIM UP! ALREADY !!!
It's breathtaking that Mr. Number One NeoCon Extraordinaire™ doesn't "support military action".
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was founded in 1997 by the right wing thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan. This group is arguably one of the most influential in Washington and is thought to have a significant influence on - or at least to reflect - much of George Bush's view of the world.
The PNAC believes that America should use its power to shape the world and further American interests across the world - by military means if necessary. It has some high profile sympathisers including US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, the under-secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security and Richard Perle .
America's defence
All of these people were among a group of 18 who signed a letter from the PNAC to Bill Clinton in 1998 urging him to topple Saddam's regime. The most important document produced by the group was published In September 2000, as Mr Bush was running for the presidency.
The report called "Rebuilding America's Defences" said that America's goal should be to "promote American global leadership". It called for increased defence spending coupled with a strong foreign policy which promotes American democracy across the globe - all hallmarks of the current US foreign policy.
(snip)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/3032147.stm
https://archive.org/download/ProjectForANewAmericanCenturyRebuildingAmericasDefenses/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
Spawning More Evil Monsters.
💙💛
Yosemite Sham is full of shit.
