President Trump asked China’s leader to assist him with his reelection effort, former national security adviser John Bolton’s book claims.
During a private meeting at the June 2019 G-20 summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump asked if China could help his reelection campaign by purchasing agricultural products, according to Bolton. The move, Trump said, would help him gain votes among farmers, according to an excerpt published by the Wall Street Journal.
“He then, stunningly, 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,” Bolton wrote in his unreleased book. “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.”
[Read more: Pompeo said Trump was ‘full of shit’: Bolton book]
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who claims to have been present at that meeting, told lawmakers at a hearing Wednesday that Bolton’s claims that the president asked Xi to help him win reelection by purchasing agricultural products was “absolutely untrue.”
According to Bolton’s memoir, a 592-page book titled The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, Xi was complaining to Trump about critics of China in the United States, and Trump reportedly assumed Xi was referring to Democrats. Trump agreed with the Chinese leader and proceeded to make his request.
“These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency,”Bolton wrote. The former national security adviser also argued that the China trade deal, the U.S. approach to Chinese telecoms, the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Uyghurs, and China’s crackdown in Hong Kong were all viewed by Trump through the lens of deal-making with an eye on winning again in 2020.
A lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the Justice Department seeks to block the publication of Bolton’s book, alleging that it reveals classified information. However, Bolton’s attorney said otherwise, asserting that it went through a thorough vetting process. The book is set to hit shelves on June 23.
Bolton claimed that at a December 2018 dinner with Xi, the Chinese president “began by telling Trump how wonderful he was” and that “one highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him.” Bolton wrote that “Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.”
“Trump’s conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and U.S. national interests,” Bolton wrote. “Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”
Bolton pointed to Trump’s handling of the threats posed by Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, which the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon have deemed national security threats. While members of the Trump administration pushed the president to strictly enforce U.S. regulations and laws against the Chinese companies, “Trump, by contrast, saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an opportunity to make personal gestures to Xi,” Bolton claimed.
The former national security adviser said in 2018 Trump reversed some of the penalties that the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE, and claimed that a year later the president “offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the trade deal — which, of course, was primarily about getting Trump re-elected in 2020.”
The Justice Department backed the FCC’s successful plan late last year to block Huawei and ZTE from receiving federal money to help build U.S. broadband infrastructure, and the U.S. also charged Huawei in a global racketeering scheme this year. The Justice Department has increased its scrutiny of China’s activities, charging an increased number of Chinese nationals espionage cases, cracking down on hacking schemes, prosecuting efforts to steal trade secrets, and going after its Thousand Talents Program.
Bolton claimed Xi “explained” to Trump in June 2019 “why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang.” Citing the U.S. interpreter, Bolton asserted that Trump “said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
The U.S. imposed sanctions on Chinese companies “complicit” in the abuse of Uyghurs in May, and Trump signed a Uighur human rights bill into law on Wednesday.
Amid last summer’s mass Hong Kong protests against Chinese government overreach, Bolton claimed Trump said, “I don’t want to get involved” and “we have human-rights problems too.” Bolton further claimed Trump refused to issue a White House statement on the 30th anniversary of the crackdown on protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, quoting the president saying, “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything.”
The U.S. has repeatedly condemned China’s renewed Hong Kong crackdown this year and has warned that there will be consequences for China’s actions.
“Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different,” Bolton wrote.
Bolton ultimately offered to testify in the impeachment trial earlier this year only if the Republican-led Senate issued a subpoena against him, which the upper chamber declined to do. The Democrat-led House had asked Bolton to testify but, after he refused, declined to issue a subpoena to compel his testimony through the courts.
The House impeached Trump on allegations of abuse of power related to Ukraine and of obstruction of Congress in December, but the Senate acquitted him following an impeachment trial in February.
