as the wind blows up...

blowing up or "blowing up"?...

Bolton Says Trump Impeachment Inquiry Missed Other Troubling Actions

In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes episodes where the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump’s loyalists mocked him behind his back.

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Mr. Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

The book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday and has already become a political lightning rod in the thick of an election campaign and a No. 1 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department filed a last-minute lawsuit against Mr. Bolton this week seeking to stop publication even as Mr. Trump’s critics complained that Mr. Bolton should have come forward during impeachment proceedings rather than save his account for a $2 million book contract.

While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/us/politics/bolton-book-trump-impeach...

Removing the US from NATO? What a great move!... And by the way, all these "aids and advisors" need TRUMP if they want to continue having a job... His desire to "buy" Greenland is far more clever than the guys are letting out. Things like these never happen in a jiffy... Trump sows CONFUSION and CHAOS until everyone has no idea where he's coming from and he does the final deal when people are cornered... The technique isn't new. In Europe as mentioned some kings made deals which were contradicted by secret agreements in order to screw other nations. Whether the boorish Donald knows about this or not, he would not care much. He follows his nose while all the other dogs are running in circles...

By Gus Leonisky at 18 Jun 2020 - 9:45am
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bolton is no diplomat...

And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

Mr. Bolton is a complicated, controversial figure. A former official under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush who rose to United Nations ambassador, he has been one of Washington’s most vocal advocates for a hard-line foreign policy, a supporter of the Iraq war who has favored possible military action against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/us/politics/bolton-book-trump-impeach...

Trump employed Bolton to do exactly the opposite of Bolton's suggestion while appearing to go along. Having Bolton cooped up in his stable, was a way for Trump to shut up the idiot Bolton... Bolton is a dangerous guy and trump knows this... Unless let's be sarcastic here, trump is not happy to be painted black by a guy who is 100 times blacker than he is...

the DoJ versus bolton...

The Department of Justice has slapped ex-national security adviser John Bolton with a lawsuit, seeking to stop the publication of his upcoming book, insisting it contains classified material and must complete a pre-print review.

Filed on Tuesday, the 27-page complaint requests that Bolton be ordered to obtain “written authorization” to publish the memoir – ‘The Room Where It Happened’ – which has been billed as a tell-all account of his time working in the White House under the Donald Trump administration.

Publishing the book would be a “clear breach of agreements [Bolton] signed as a condition of his employment and as a condition of gaining access to highly classified information,” the DOJ said in its filing, arguing the book is “rife” with such material.

https://www.rt.com/usa/492070-doj-sues-john-bolton-memoir/

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By Gus Leonisky at 18 Jun 2020 - 4:34pm
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what a creep...

By JOHN NOLTE 18 Jun 2020

John Bolton, another disgruntled Deep State Trump-hater, leaks a bunch of unverified hysteria by way of the far-left media, and I’m supposed to not only summon the strength to care, but express how little I care.

These Deep State leaks used to worry me.

Then the leaks annoyed me.

Then they angered me.

Now they just bore me — bore me to tears. It’s all so tedious and predictable you feel foolish giving it even a moment’s thought, but here we go.

So the very same media that despise Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who have loathed this man for two decades, who have assured us and reassured us he is a liar and war-monger, are now holding him up as a man who epitomizes everything good and holy about Washington, DC, and the brave and honorable men who keep us safe.

Yep, it’s another round of that shit…

For whatever insane reason, back in April of 2018, Trump hired Bolton as his national security adviser, which made about as much sense as Jerry hiring Tom as a personal bodyguard. Anyway, things went about as well as expected when a president dedicated to peace and smashing globalism, a president desperate to untangle America from all its disastrous foreign wars, hires as his national security adviser the very man who lobbied in favor of those disastrous foreign wars (though, to be fair to John Bolton, he is in favor of war with anyone — not just the disastrous ones).

This wasn’t a Scaramucci-level awful hire on Trump’s part, more like an Omarosa-level awful hire.

About 17 months later, Trump announced he had fired Bolton. Bolton claimed he resigned. Apparently, Bolton wanted America to launch another endless war, this one with Iran, and Trump said no, so Tom and Jerry divorced.

Anyone still awake? Because you all know what’s coming next… A book, salacious details, strange new respect from the fake media, Nothingburgers cooked to look like unprecedented, democracy-threatening Somethingburgers, and almost certainly five years of “CNN National Security Analyst John Bolton is here to explain to us just what a gigantic piece of orange shit Trump really is…”

ZZZzzzz…

Fast-forward to this year… Congressional Democrats launch their impeachment hoax over a Nothingburger phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine (a phone call Bolton approved of, by the way) and once Democrats got wind Bolton was writing a tell-all, they asked him to testify — something he would have been required to do under oath.

Bolton played cute. He said he would not testify voluntarily, but only with a court order — a court order Bolton had to have known would have dragged out the legal process beyond the eager-to-impeach Democrats’ tolerance level. So no court order was issued. Bolton also refused to reveal what he knew in an affidavit to the House, which also would have been under oath.

In other words, Bolton avoided any situation where he would have had to reveal all the details of his book 1) before the book came out, and 2) under oath.

No one’s going to buy a book when they already know the details, amiright?

But…

You can print any garbage you want about a public figure in a book… Under oath is a completely different story… Amiright?

So now that the book is coming out, Bolton is leaking details…

Anyone smell a rat?

I mean, if Bolton is such an upstanding and honorable man who is oh-so concerned about Trump’s fitness for office, he’s certainly not so concerned and honorable he was willing to hurt his book sales at a time when something could have actually been done about Trump’s so-called unfitness — you know, during impeachment.

Anyway, according to Daddy Warmonger who refused to say so under oath, the Bad Orange Man is, like, really, really bad…

Trump asked China to help him win reelection.
Trump told China’s president that building internment camps was the right thing to do.
Trump offered personal favors to dictators — like looking into the investigation of a Turkish company over potential violations for Turkish President Erdogan.
Trump said he wanted to serve more than two terms as president.
Trump had no idea the U.K. was a nuclear power.
Trump seriously considered quitting NATO.
Trump said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once sent a note to Bolton describing Trump as “full of shit.”

By my count, of those nine things, I hope three are true, I assume two are lies, and the other four cracked me up.

As far as the lies…

Through a spokesman, Pompeo denied the note passing: “The only person full of shit is John Bolton. The secretary is not a note passer. And if he has such a note, he should put up or shut up.”

Does Bolton have the note? Who would throw such a thing away? Put up or shut up, pal.

Regardless, who cares?

As far as praising China’s concentration camps, as my colleague Joel Pollak discovered, “John Bolton claims President Donald Trump told China’s president to go ahead with Muslim concentration camps in June 2019, but the Trump administration had condemned them already in July 2018.”

So there’s that.

What’s more, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who was in the room at the time, vigorously denied Trump asked Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for reelection help:

“Absolutely untrue. Never happened. I was there. I have no recollection of that ever happening. I don’t believe it’s true. I don’t believe it ever happened.”

Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) pushed back “So, now you fully recollect that you were there?”

“No, I was at the meeting. Would I recollect if something as crazy as that [happened]? Of course, I would recollect it. I was at the meeting.”

Menendez then cut in to ask, “You weren’t sure at the beginning that you were at the meeting. So, now that I know you’re at the meeting, you, in essence, dispute Mr. Bolton’s account of what took place?”

Lighthizer responded, “Yes, that’s correct. … I said what meeting I was at, and this never happened in it, for sure. Completely crazy.”

Need I add that Lighthizer was under oath?

Let’s say it was true… I’m supposed to care after Barack Obama was caught on an open microphone telling the Russians that if they give him more space to win reelection in 2012 he will cave to them on missile defense?

Oh, gasp and egads, look at how they make the sausage, Mildred!

Grow up.

Anyway, I believe Lighthizer — you know, the guy under oath.

So here we go again… A mercenary, disgruntled, Deep Stater desperate to sell his book colludes with the fake media for another news cycle of tedious lies and nonsense, and one more godforsaken round of tasteless, boring Nothingburgers that even if true, would still be Nothingburgers.

P.S. One item to take seriously in all of this is the “norm” Bolton is violating in order to cash in and earn some affection from the media…

A National Security Adviser writing a “tell-all” about the president he served, especially in the run-up to an election… This is a terrible precedent to set.

A president used to be able to talk openly and honestly with his national security adviser, and sometimes that means spit-balling, venting… This is an important relationship, one built on trust, and vital to any president for reasons I should not have explain. But now the greedy, narcissistic Bolton is blowing all that up. What a creep.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/18/nolte-john-bolton-serves-u...

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4 hours 1 min ago

Interestingly, the WaPo has an article placing trump and Bolton in the same chaff-bag, while the NYT has an article that tells of how a good moderate Bolton is... Both are bullshit. Bolton is a dangerous man. Trump is a clever idiot and Biden has no clue about anything. The US needs a major shift in its management, but with the Deep State in control, it's going to be painful to watch...

a no new war president...

By George Galloway

Bloodthirsty John Bolton’s book on Trump is fueled by frustration that the president hasn’t led the US into a major war

John Bolton’s vindictive tell-all ‘The Room Where It Happened’ contains little of worth on Donald Trump and seems motivated by anger that the US did not attack Venezuela, Iran or North Korea.

Walrus-whiskered John Bolton and his well-remunerated kiss-and-tell memoir of life on the same page as Donald Trump is already a bestseller in the febrile pre-election atmosphere of the US. A tabloid National Enquirer treat, in hardback.

Only marginally less surprising is his instant beatification by the prancers of the American liberal chatterati. Like George W. Bush, the late John McCain and Colin Powell, Bolton is the latest blood-soaked war criminal to be handed his pussy hat by the progressives, the resistance to Donald J. Trump.

That you could circumnavigate America with the bodies laid end to end of their victims is of less moment than his new role as persecutor of the only man in the States stupid enough to have employed him, President Trump. Any minute now Rachel Maddow will break down in tears at Bolton's self-sacrifice in the liberal cause. For them only some lives matter, and only some of the time.

Of course I have only read the leaks – I won't be swelling his coffers – but they don't add up to a hill of (soya) beans so far, despite the media hysteria.

Trump apparently “begged” Chinese president Xi Jinping to “buy American farm produce.” Well, that will hurt him in the plains to be sure. Every leader in the world asks their interlocutors to ‘Buy British’ or ‘Buy American’ or whatever. That does not equate to ‘electoral interference’.

Trump apparently asked British PM Theresa May if “Britain were a nuclear-power.” She presumably answered – how could one tell? – in the affirmative. He might have meant a nuclear energy power, which would have been a fair question as we now use as much wind these days, having flooded our coal-mines and retreated from the anti-nuclear lobby when it comes to power-generation.

Or he may have been correctly stating the bleeding obvious: Britain has NEVER had a truly independent nuclear weapons capability, supplied, as our weapons are, by the USA. The renewed Trident submarine strike-force might as well be badged in the Stars and Stripes.

Trump allegedly was more interested in the optics of his historic meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and how it would help his re-election. Heaven forfend, a politician focussed on his re-election. Who’d have thunk it?

And he “seemed to agree”in Beijing that “America has too many elections.” Is there any sentient being who could think otherwise? Who could possibly consider the US Constitution – crisis stricken, centuries out of date, in a permanent election mode, where an electoral college rather than the people picks the president, in which Wyoming is a state but Washington, DC isn’t, and where the Senate gives the same representation to Vermont as to California – as the acme of modern governance?

So what if Trump would have fancied a third term? He can’t have one and may not even get a second.

As for “thinking Finland was a part of Russia,” I don't doubt there are many Finns who wish they were. For now it will have to be content with being Russia’s next-door neighbour.

There is no doubt that John Bolton knows more about the world than Donald Trump – an urban hick, the original orange-neck. After all Bolton, has been contriving plans to invade much of the world over several decades. When you boil it all down, it’s not that Trump thinks it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela, it’s that he didn't think it cool enough to actually do it, despite the “begging” of John Bolton.

Trump disappointed John Bolton because he wouldn't invade Venezuela, Iran, wouldn’t invade North Korea, wouldn’t invade anywhere new. And he’s frustrated that, unless something happens between now and November, Trump will end his term having started no new wars, withdrawn more troops from foreign adventures and fired fewer rockets than almost all of his unillustrious predecessors. Newly pussy-hatted Bolton, on the other hand, still couldn’t win election as dogcatcher in Albuquerque.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/492614-galloway-john-bolton-trump-book/

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world war six...

Sanders shared an excerpt from her memoir after a federal court judge on Saturday allowed Bolton to release his own book, which the US administration tried to block, saying it contained certain classified information about current events and policy issues.

Sarah Sanders posted a series of tweets on late Monday, in which the former White House press secretary shared a full excerpt from her book "Speaking for Myself", to be released later this year, about ex-national security advisor John Bolton.

....

Bolton's own book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir", to be published on Tuesday, portrays Trump as a weak president easily manipulated by other leaders.

Last week, the US administration filed a lawsuit against Bolton to prevent publication of his book, which it says contains certain classified information about current events and policy issues, but it was rejected by the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia.

Trump himself slammed the book as nothing but "lies and fake stories" made up by an "incompetent" and "disgruntled" fired official.

Bolton was dismissed by Trump in September 2019 over their disagreements on a wide range of issues. He was considered one of the most "hawkish" officials in the Trump administration, given his harsh stance on Iran and North Korea and calls for Washington to deepen US involvement in Venezuela's affairs. Trump once said that if he had listened to Bolton's hawkish foreign policy advice, the US "would be in World War Six by now".

https://sputniknews.com/us/202006221079692606-man-drunk-on-power-ex-white-house-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-slams-bolton-in-her-upcoming-book/

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ballooning bolton as a beacon of sainthood...

The Western media, always hating Trump beyond black hole S3571, now licks the devil Bolton's arse as if if ever was the image of sanity, wisdom and infinite morality. Please, you effing morons, Bolton IS A WARMONGER WHO DID NOT GET HIS WAYS WITH TRUMP. TRUMP REFUSED TO GO TO WAR UNDER THE PUNCHES OF BOLTON... Bolton thus hates (or does he?) Trump beyond planet R435217... So this interview by Der Spiegel is rubbish, bullshit, garbage, refuse, crap, dogpoo, and catpiss:

Bolton: Trump's relationships with Chancellor Merkel and (former British Prime Minister) Theresa May were two of the most difficult that I saw. I think there's an element of increased difficulty with female foreign leaders. But with Merkel, it's kind of complicated - the president's father was German, so that might have something to do with it. But there are also political reasons. U.S.-EU trade relations have been a major source of controversy between the U.S. and Germany. Then there is the issue of support for NATO and the agreement that each member state would spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, which Germany is behind on.

DER SPIEGEL: Trump, though, has similar conflicts with a number of other world leaders. Could it be that he simply has a problem with women?

Bolton: I do think that is a factor. But he has a problem with a lot of democratically elected leaders, male or female. He seems to have better relations with authoritarian figures than with many who are elected in democratic countries.

DER SPIEGEL: How would you explain that?

Bolton: Part of Trump's difficulty with international affairs is his lack of any philosophical basis. He has no philosophy. That was a complicating factor across the board. I am a conservative Republican. He is not. But he's not a liberal Democrat either. He tends to confuse personal relationships with foreign leaders with the underlying bilateral relationship between the U.S. and that country.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-john-bolton-trump-is-capable-of-almost-anything

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Brother! Trump has no philosophical basis... Yes! WE KNOW THAT FUCKER! But we also know that the Bolton philosophical basis, his CONservative Republicanacaca, is to wage wars, WARS, WARS. Bomb, Bomb, BOMB! This is Bolton diplomatic extend... Nothing else, until the bloody planet belongs to the USA Republicans. Asking Bolton to "explain that" is like asking Hitler to provide a note from his mum why he should exterminate the Jews...

Idiots!

By Gus Leonisky at 18 Jul 2020 - 9:11am
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