The Trump administration’s top trade official slammed John Bolton’s claim that the president asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win reelection by purchasing agricultural products, calling it “absolutely untrue” and “completely crazy.”
Asked by Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, whether the story excerpted in a forthcoming tell-all by President Trump’s former national security adviser was accurate, United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer denied the allegation.
“There was a meeting in on the outskirts of the G-20, in Osaka between the president and President Xi, and I was in that meeting,” Lighthizer said during a Senate hearing Wednesday. “Absolutely untrue. Never happened,” Lighthizer said of the allegation. “I was there. I’ve no recollection of that ever happening. I don’t believe it’s true. I don’t believe it ever happened.”
He continued: “I don’t want you to think I’m being deceptive. I said what meeting I was at, and this never happened at it. For sure.”
Bolton’s book claims that during a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Trump “turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, 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. I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise,” Bolton writes.
The White House has sought to halt Bolton’s book, with the Justice Department filing an injunction this week to put a stop to it.
In the negotiations with Beijing, Lighthizer “was very worried about how much Trump would give away once untethered.”
Bolton’s forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is scheduled to be published Tuesday.
