President Trump signed into law a Uighur human rights bill on the same day an excerpt from John Bolton’s book was leaked, claiming that he told Chinese President Xi Jinping to go ahead with building concentration camps to house the Muslim minority group.
The legislation, called the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, “condemns gross human rights violations of specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China and other purposes, including specified authority to impose sanctions on certain foreign persons.”
The White House released a statement Wednesday afternoon to declare that Trump signed it about an hour after multiple outlets published leaks from his former national security adviser’s unreleased book, The Room Where it Happened.
On such excerpt describes a conversation between Trump and Xi in 2019:
“At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton wrote in an excerpt obtained by the Wall Street Journal. “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.”
Bolton also claimed that Trump asked him at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why the United States was even considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the more than 1 million ethnic Muslims who have been forcibly detained.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Bolton on Tuesday, asking a judge to stop the book’s release, set for June 23, because it contains classified material.
In a statement released by the White House, Trump said the bill he signed Wednesday “holds accountable perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses such as the systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and other minorities in China.”
However, the president noted that he took issue with one aspect of it, claiming that “section 6(g) of the Act purports to limit my discretion to terminate inadmissibility sanctions under the Act. In some circumstances, this limitation could be inconsistent with my constitutional authorities to receive as diplomatic representatives certain foreign officials under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution.”
Because of this, Trump said, his administration will treat this section as “advisory and non‑binding.”
