David Corn: John Bolton Provides a Harrowing Portrait of Trump's Surrender to Putin [View all]

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/john-bolton-provides-a-harrowing-portrait-of-trumps-surrender-to-putin/

John Bolton Provides a Harrowing Portrait of Trump’s Surrender to Putin
His book offers more evidence that Trump won’t stop a Russian attack on 2020.
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow



John Bolton’s too-late book has produced a string of revelations that warrant headlines and outrage. President Donald Trump, in this account, encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to build concentration camps as part of China’s genocidal war on its Uighur population. Trump beseeched Xi to help him win reelection in 2020. He displayed brazen ignorance. (He didn’t know the United Kingdom is a nuclear power or that Finland is not part of Russia.) And he did indeed withhold military aid to pressure the Ukrainian president—for which he was impeached—to launch investigations to tar Joe Biden and promote a nutty conspiracy theory that holds that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the 2016 presidential election. Receiving less attention than these made-for-Twitter disclosures is what Bolton says about Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s attack on that election. But this stuff is important, for here is yet another indication that Trump has no interest in thwarting a Kremlin assault on the current election.

According to Trump’s own top intelligence officials, Moscow is currently trying to intervene in the 2020 campaign. Both FBI Director Chris Wray and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe have said so in congressional testimony, without providing details about the ongoing covert Russian efforts. So one obvious question is, what is Trump doing about this? The answer, per Bolton, is nothing.

In his book, Bolton does not go into great depth on this crucial matter. But Trump’s former national security adviser notes that Trump “willfully ignored or denied that Russia was meddling globally in US and many other elections.” This is the public posture Trump has taken since the 2016 election and through his years in the White House. He has downplayed or dismissed the Russian attack, even though the US intelligence community has concluded it occurred and was mounted by Vladimir Putin in part to help Trump win. (A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report cited an intelligence intercept of a communication from a Russian cyber-operative who described Election Night this way: “On November 9, 2016, a sleepless night was ahead of us. And when around 8 a.m. the most important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne…took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes…We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great.'”) Still, even in the privacy of the Oval Office, Trump would not discuss with his top national security aide the Russian intervention—or, worse, the prospect of a repeat performance.

“Trump believed that acknowledging Russia’s meddling in US politics, or in that of many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, would implicitly acknowledge that he had colluded with Russia in his 2016 campaign,” Bolton writes.

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Overall, the book illuminates Trump’s foremost sin: He has repeatedly placed his own personal interests ahead of the national security of the United States. Bolton could not even have an honest and straightforward conversation with Trump about this. In one chilling passage, Bolton recounts that he not once spoke candidly with Trump regarding Putin: “He never offered an opinion [of Putin], at least in front of me. I never asked what Trump’s view was, perhaps afraid of what I might hear.”

When the national security adviser to the president cannot talk to the commander in chief about a paramount threat to the country, it is a sign that neither one of them should continue in their jobs.