Donald Trump’s claim of not being reported on intelligence suggesting that Russia paid Taliban-linked militants to kill US soldiers “is simply not the way the system works,” the former security adviser said Sunday. John Bolton National.
Bolton appeared on Face the Nation, the Sunday talk show for ViacomCBS, the communications giant owned by Simon & Schuster, the publisher who published Bolton’s White House memoirs of Trump, The Room Where It Happened, about the objection. of the president.
Elsewhere, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice said Bolton would have known about the intelligence of the rewards while in office, which he left in September 2019, and thus reported to Trump himself.
“I don’t buy this story that it was never reported,” Rice told NBC’s Meet The Press. “I think … when the information first came to light in 2019, my successor, John Bolton, would have entered the Oval Office directly, as he would have, and informed the president of this intelligence.”
Bolton’s book, a revelation that sold nearly 800,000 copies in its first week in stores, is named after the Oval Office and contains numerous shocking descriptions of Trump’s behavior. But it doesn’t mention the supposed rewards plot.
“I am not going to reveal classified information,” Bolton told CBS. “I already have the fight with the president trying to suppress my book in that regard.”
Bolton subjected his book to a national security review but was reprimanded by a federal judge for “probable publication of classified materials”, “gambling with the national security of the United States” and “exposing … himself to civil liability ( and potentially criminal) “.
On Sunday Bolton said: “I will say this. All intelligence is distributed across the spectrum of uncertainty. And this intelligence in 2020, by the administration’s own admission, was deemed credible enough to be given to our allies. So the notion that you only give the president really 100% verified intelligence means you give him next to nothing. And that’s not the way the system works. “
The existence of intelligence about a rewards plan, which Russia has denied, was first reported by the New York Times and then confirmed by other means. Trump attacked the Times on Twitter this weekend.
Amid inconsistent explanations from the White House about Trump’s alleged ignorance of the matter, current national security adviser Robert O’Brien said a CIA official withheld information, even though it was included in the daily report of the President.
“The president’s brief CIA career decided not to inform him because it was unverified intelligence,” O’Brien told Fox News, adding: “She made that call and, you know, I think she made the correct call, so I’m not. I’m going to criticize her. And knowing the facts that I know now, I support that call. “
O’Brien was widely criticized. Ned Price, a former CIA analyst, told The Guardian: “This is the same scapegoat move that the White House executed in the context of the coronavirus, blaming Trump’s intelligence for something that is primarily and fundamentally a failure of the White House staff. “
Bolton said any decision to withhold intelligence “certainly will not” be “made only by the briefest report to the president twice a week. That is a decision that at least when I was there would have been made by the director of national intelligence , the CIA director, me and the shortest together. “
Although his book is a brutal and extensive anatomization of Trump’s personality and fitness or otherwise for office, Bolton avoided the opportunity to criticize O’Brien and said, “I don’t want to make this a matter of personalities.” .
Nor would he say whether he had known about the intelligence rewards or not.
“What was made public in 2018,” he said, “was Russian assistance to the Taliban, and that has been known for some time. That is just worrying.
“What is particularly concerning, if true, is this latest information that they were … providing compensation for killing Americans. And that’s the kind of thing where you go to the president and say, ‘Look … we may not know everything about this, but a nuclear power is providing rewards for killing Americans.’
“That’s the kind of thing you need to have in the president’s opinion so that you can think about it as it unfolds, well, at least as normal presidents develop a strategy for managing Russia, managing Afghanistan.”
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