White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro described as “revenge porn” claims made by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton in a new tell-all about the president, disputing his claims and characterizing Bolton as the “warlord” of “an autonomous zone in the National Security Council” during his tenure.
“My take on him is Big Lie Bolton, it’s Book Deal Bolton — he is doing it for the money, that is pretty clear, and my view is it [is] the Washington swamp’s equivalent of revenge porn,” Navarro said to reporters outside of the White House on Thursday. He had been calling it “deep-swamp revenge porn” moments earlier in a Fox News interview.
Bolton “set up an autonomous zone in the National Security Council office and established himself effectively as his own warlord,” Navarro said. “He refused to obey anything coming from the chief of staff. And then, in terms of being in sync with the foreign policy, with the White House, he had no interest in it.”
Navarro said that he expected Bolton, a longtime foreign policy hawk who has served multiple administrations, to take “a strong interest” in the White House’s China policy. “I was really surprised when he came out so hard, leading with the idea that this President Donald J. Trump, the greatest president in history, standing up to China would somehow be soft on China.”
Trump’s manufacturing czar denied Bolton’s claim that the president asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products ahead of the election to help him win in farm states. He also said it was untrue that Trump spoke approvingly of Chinese-run concentration camps for Uighurs.
“I was at that dinner that Bolton purports to have heard something which he’s described. I didn’t hear that. I didn’t hear that at all,” Navarro said. Bolton’s book repeatedly characterizes Trump’s interactions with Xi as driven “by reelection calculations” and says his advisers were divided by their divergent views on China, characterizing them as “panda huggers,” “free-traders,” or China hawks “like Commerce Secretary Ross, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro.”
Bolton also writes that, according to the administration’s interpreter, Trump, during the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 where only interpreters were present, suggested Xi to “go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Trump denied Bolton’s claims as “a compilation of lies and made up stories,” calling his former adviser a “sick puppy” and wrote that “President Bush fired him also.”
Navarro criticized Bolton’s time in the Bush White House, too.
“The pattern of behavior of John Book Deal Bolton is to go into an administration, advance his own agenda, and when he gets fired from that administration or leaves like he did in the Bush administration, he leaves and then criticizes the people he left behind who gave him the job,” Navarro said. “He did that with the Bush administration after he helped get the Bush administration into the Iraq War by pushing the big lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That’s the pattern.”
