President Donald Trump “pleaded” with China’s Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit to help his reelection prospects, according to a scathing new book by former Trump adviser John Bolton that accuses the president of being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions.
The White House worked furiously to block the book, asking a federal court for an emergency temporary restraining order Wednesday against its release.
Bolton’s allegations that Trump solicited Chinese help for his reelection effort carried echoes of Trump’s attempt to get political help from Ukraine, which led to his impeachment.
Bolton wrote, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”
The 577-page book paints a very revealing portrait of Trump and his administration, amounting to the most vivid, first-person account yet of how Trump conducts himself in office. Several other former officials have written books, but most have been flattering about the president.
Other former officials have indicated they were saving their accounts of their time working for Trump until after he left office in order to speak more candidly. The Associated Press obtained a copy of Bolton’s book in advance of its release next week.
Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser for a 17-month period, called Trump’s attempt to shift the June 2019 conversation with Xi to the U.S. election a stunning move, and wrote that it was among innumerable conversations that he found concerning. He added that Congress should have expanded the scope of its impeachment inquiry to these other incidents.
Deeply critical of the president and much of his senior team, Bolton wrote that because staff had served him so poorly, Trump, “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.” He added that while he was at the White House, Trump typically had only two intelligence briefings a week, “and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.”
The book also includes embarrassing claims that Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, didn’t know that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power and called reporters “scumbags” who should be “executed.”
As for the meeting with the Chinese president in Osaka, Japan, Bolton wrote that Trump told Xi that Democrats were hostile to China. Bolton said, “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. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
The book, titled “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is set to be released Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. It has been the subject of a lengthy battle between Bolton and the White House.
The Justice Department filed suit Tuesday in an effort to delay publication of the book, claiming it still contained highly classified information and that a required review by the National Security Council had not been concluded. According to the filing, a career official determined no classified material remained in April, but national security adviser Robert O’Brien initiated a secondary review that deemed additional information to be classified.
The White House’s contention that so much of the book was classified appeared to be a tacit admission that many of Bolton’s allegations were accurate — as inaccurate information could not be classified.
