Trump battles to halt memoir as Bolton calls president 'not fit for office'

The Trump administration will go to court on Friday in an effort to halt publication of John Bolton’s memoir of his time as national security adviser, on the grounds it contains classified material.

Justice department lawyers are likely to face an uphill struggle in Washington district court, as hundreds of thousands of copies of The Room Where It Happened, due for publication on Tuesday, have already been sent to booksellers, excerpts have appeared in the press, and Donald Trump had on Twitter denounced it as “a compilation of lies and made-up stories”, dismissing Bolton as a “wacko”.

Trump’s description of Bolton’s book as a work of fiction will make it hard for the government to prove the assertion in its court filing that the “disclosure of the manuscript will damage the national security of the United States.”

Bolton, meanwhile, continued to step up pressure on his former employer, describing Trump as not “fit for office”, and not having “the competence to carry out the job”.

He made the comments in an interview with ABC News, the full version of which will be aired on Sunday. In an excerpt screened on Thursday, Bolton said Trump was a “stunningly uninformed” man whose ignorance could be easily manipulated by foreign adversaries.

“He was so focused on the re-election that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside,” Bolton said. “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s re-election”.

As Trump’s longest serving national security adviser, Bolton attended the president’s meetings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un before resigning from the White House last September.

According to Bolton, Trump told Xi last year that the mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs was “exactly the right thing to do” and appealed to the Chinese president to buy more US farm produce as it would help get him re-elected.

When asked about Trump’s three summits with Kim, Bolton told ABC News: “There was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it, and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States.”

“I was sick at heart over Trump’s zeal to meet with Kim Jong-un,” he wrote, according to an advance copy seen by ABC.

Bolton said he would be “hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during [his] tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations”.

Trump, lashed out at Bolton on Twitter, implying he had caused the failure of the diplomatic initiative with North Korea when the he appeared on television in 2018 to suggest the US follow the “Libya model” for disarming North Korea.

Muammar Gaddafi surrendered his embryonic nuclear programme in 2003 in pursuit of better relations with the west, but it did not save him from being overthrown and killed in the Arab spring revolt of 2011.

Trump said that after Bolton’s interview, “all hell broke out. Kim Jong-un, who we were getting along with very well, went ballistic, just like his missiles – and rightfully so.”

Trump continued on Twitter: “He didn’t want Bolton anywhere near him. Bolton’s dumbest-of-all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I asked him, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’

“He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should have fired him right then and there!”

Many North Korea experts saw Bolton’s “Libya model” intervention as a deliberate attempt to sabotage Trump’s summitry with Kim, but almost all agree that Trump’s efforts failed because Kim never had any intention of giving up his nuclear arsenal.

Bolton, an ultra-hawk on most foreign policy issues, says in his book that the “turning point” in his decision to leave the Trump administration was the president’s last-minute decision to call off air strikes against Iran in June last year.

In one of a string of angry tweets devoted to Bolton, Trump said his book was a compilation of lies and made-up stories, all intended to make him look bad.

“Many of the ridiculous statements he attributes to me were never made, pure fiction. Just trying to get even for firing him like the sick puppy he is!” Trump said.

The Room Where It Happened includes multiple anecdotes that portray Trump as ignorant about the world. According to Bolton, the president was unaware that the UK had its own nuclear weapons.

He recalls a meeting in 2018 with the then prime minister, Theresa May, at which a British official referred to the UK as a “nuclear power”.

Trump replied, “Oh, are you a nuclear power?”, in a tone of voice that made Bolton believe it “was not intended as a joke”, according to a Washington Post excerpt from the book.

A former US official confirmed the account and described a similar conversation with May when Trump made a state visit to the UK in June 2019.

“He told May the No 1 existential threat is still nuclear weapons, and not climate change or any of these other issues that all these other people were raising,” the former official told the Guardian.

When May asked how that would affect the UK deterrent, the official said Trump appeared taken aback by the question.

“In his view, this was all about the US and Russia,” the official said. “He didn’t really factor in the other countries.”

Democrats have castigated Bolton for his failure to testify at the impeachment hearings, accusing him of withholding evidence of presidential abuses to boost sales of his book. They are considering a subpoena to force Bolton to repeat his assertions about Trump under oath before Congress.

Joe Biden, Trump’s rival for the White House in the November presidential election, called the alleged actions by Trump “morally repugnant”.

“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values,” Biden said on Wednesday night.