TRANSCRIPT: John Bolton interview with ABC News' Martha Raddatz (ABC) [View all]

[Mike 03]

Link: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-john-bolton-interview-abc-news-martha-raddatz/story?id=71287825

Excerpt:

RADDATZ: And President Trump, of course, got the summit with him in Helsinki in July, 2018. You were worried about leaving him alone in a room with Vladimir Putin. Why?

BOLTON: Because I didn't know what he would say. At any given moment, we didn't know what he was gonna say. Now, it turned out and I say in the book, I feel very confident nothing untoward happened in the one on one. But that means we escaped without injury in the meeting.

That not advancing American interests. I mean, it's better than sustaining the injury. But it's certainly not advancing the interests. Then, of course, we had the famous press conference. And the equivalency that the president ascribed, he says, because he was misunderstood, to what our intelligence was saying about Russian interference in American elections and Vladimir Putin's denial. It was a stunning moment.

RADDATZ: You said you were frozen in your seat watching that.

BOLTON: I -- I -- I -- I -- I thought I wouldn't get up. I didn't know what to do. And it was -- I describe in the book, we went through a lot of gyrations. And I say -- to try and explain it -- I thought Dan Coats, then the director of national intelligence, was close to resignation.

Ultimately, he didn't resign. And the president -- found a way of -- of tryin' to get out of it. But the fact is that the Russian threat to our elections and the threat from China, Iran and North Korea in different forms of cyber attacks is very, very real.

And I viewed this before I joined the administration. I viewed it while I was there, and I view it today. These are attacks on the constitution itself. These are acts of war against the United States. And we need to take them seriously. I think we took steps to get our cyber offensive capabilities into better shape during the administration, during my service there. I think that was a very important step forward.