Washington Former national security adviser John Bolton called President Trump on Sunday for his criticism of his former aide’s comment about North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons, saying the president would be “better” if he learned a “little story.”
During an interview on “Face the Nation,” Bolton was asked about a comment he made about the show in April 2018, in which he said it was a requirement for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons in negotiations with the United States. and cited Libya’s decision. he abandoned his nuclear program in 2003. Trump went on to tell Fox News in an interview last month that Bolton’s invocation of the Libyan model was “one of the dumbest things I’ve seen on television.”
Bolton defended his comment Sunday when asked if that marked the fall of their relationship, adding that “one day the president will learn a little history and would be better off because of it.”
“I guess the president’s discontent with me should make him ask, who hired that guy to start with?” he said on “Face the Nation”. “Maybe he is the one who needs to be fired.”
Bolton, who left his post at the White House last year, found himself in the White House sights with the publication of his book “The Room Where It Happened” last month. The White House attempted to block publication of the memoirs, but was unsuccessful in its efforts. The memoirs are published by Simon & Schuster, a division of ViacomCBS.
Bolton paints an unflattering image of Trump in the book and accuses the president of putting his own political interest ahead of the country. She suggested Sunday that Trump spends a lot of time watching cable television and that her thinking is based on television personalities and outside advisers rather than experts within her administration.
“I think if you could see the amount of time he actually spent in the Oval Office versus the amount of time he spent in the small dining room of the Oval Office with cable news networks in one form or another, it would be a very interesting statistic. Bolton said.
The former national security adviser also addressed intelligence reports that a Russian military espionage unit offered rewards to Taliban-linked militants for the murder of US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The New York Times and Associated Press reported that intelligence was included in Mr. Trump’s written report, but the White House has claimed that the President was never informed in person about reward intelligence due to questions surrounding its accuracy.
Bolton rejected the suggestion by the Trump administration that the president only receives intelligence that is “100% verified,” since “it would mean that you give him almost nothing.”
“That is not the way the system works,” he said, “and it is certainly not a decision made only by the shortest one who reports to the president twice a week. That is a decision that at least when I was there, it would have been taken by the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA, me and the shorter one together. “
National security adviser Robert O’Brien told reporters last week that the CIA career official reporting to Mr. Trump in person made the decision not to verbally inform him of intelligence about the Russian scheme because he did not trust the veracity of the information.
.
