By Robert Romano

John Bolton has got to be the worst National Security Advisor in U.S. history.

During Bolton’s tenure, which ended in Sept. 2019, not one but two conversations with foreign heads of state leaked out of the National Security Council that he led. The first was President Donald Trump’s July 29, 2019 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House and then acquittal by the U.S. Senate earlier this year.

In that trial, Bolton was begging to testify, and now we know why. Because he wanted to discuss what he knew about the talks with Zelensky, and perhaps even to leak another conversation by Trump with a foreign head of state, this time Trump’s June 29, 2019 high level trade talks with Chinese President Xi Zinping.

In a column in the Wall Street Journal publishing excerpts of his new book — that has not been cleared by the Justice Department because it contains classified information — Bolton alleges, “In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, [2019] Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed) American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war with China… Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and 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. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

Even if this is true — U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer says it “never happened” and he was in the room — this is a nothing burger. Here, Trump is alleged to have noted that China’s moves against U.S. farmers by halting purchases of soybeans in fact has domestic political implications. So what?

The context Bolton leaves out is that China was taking out 4-page ads in the Des Moines Register in Iowa in 2018 to try and turn farm states that tend to vote Republican against President Trump in its bid to beat the U.S. in the trade negotiations. China was clearly using the trade conflict to interfere in U.S. elections and domestic politics. Here, Trump is responding to it.

On the same day the talks occurred, June 29, 2019, Trump at a press conference in Osaka noted the progress of the trade talks and advocating on behalf of farmers and U.S. agricultural interests, mentioning “farmers” and “farms” no less than 20 times.

Publicly, Trump said, “I think our farmers are going to end up being the great beneficiary.  And what I did with the farmers — because they did lose a certain amount of money — I went to Sonny Perdue, who is our Secretary of Agriculture.  I said, ‘Sonny, how much money — in the best year — did China spend on our farms, in our farms, buying?’  He said, ‘The best year, about $16 billion.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, we’re taking in much more than that now every year in tariffs.’ And I took $16 billion out of those tariffs, and — essentially out of those tariffs — and we’re distributing it among farmers who have been hurt because they have been used as a pawn so that China could get a good deal.”

Trump added, “I’ve made up for the fact that China was, you know, targeting our farmers.  Because they know the farmers like me, and I like them.  I love them.  And they sort of love me, I guess, when you get right down to it.  And it was $16 billion — billion.  That’s a lot of money.  But I took it out the tariff money essentially, and we are in the process of distributing it.”

Here, for emphasis, Trump is saying publicly that China was “targeting our farmers… [b]ecause they know the farmers like me, and I like them.” Agricultural states largely voted for Trump in 2016. Those are his constituents. This is publicly available information. So what if Trump pointed that out in a high level trade discussion?

What Bolton is alleging Trump said privately is not much different from what he says publicly. In this case, that the farmers were being targeted by China, and the President was there to advocate for them because they voted for him.

Of course President Trump is concerned about his constituents. We live in a democratic republic. Telling a foreign leader, “You’re hurting my constituents” is not a high crime and misdemeanor, it’s what presidents are supposed to do, even if Trump speaks casually and informally about these topics. It’s called straight talk.

I for one am now interested to see the transcript and what the context of Trump’s remark really was rather than Bolton’s spin. It sounds like he was fighting for American farmers. Both his public remarks the same day and the trade deal later agreed to bear this out.

That is why it is simply beyond belief that Bolton would seek to make this highly sensitive information public.

The National Security Advisor has one very important job, and that is to provide candid advice to the President to make historic decisions, not merely for the President’s benefit, but for the benefit of future presidents and the country as a whole.

In 1986, as Assistant Attorney General, Bolton testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the William Rehnquist nomination hearings that then-President Ronald Reagan was invoking executive privilege over internal memos Rehnquist wrote when he was in the Justice Department during the Nixon administration.

Bolton quoted the famous Nixon v. Administrator of General Services decision outlining the rationale for executive privilege as a means of preserving the executive decision-making process: “Human experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances… to the detriment of the decision-making process… The privilege is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic."

Therefore, a move to violate that very privilege by publishing a book that contains privileged and classified information, by definition, would be to the detriment of the Republic. Suddenly, now presidents can no longer have advisors in the room at top-level talks because those discussions are monitored by ambitious would-be turncoats.

Given Bolton’s eagerness to testify in the impeachment trial, and now his reckless push to publish his memoirs, one has to call into question why he wanted to be Trump’s National Security Advisor in the first place. Certainly not to help the President achieve the agenda he was elected on—including the Trump trade agenda to put America first. No, it was to take notes.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: http://dailytorch.com/2020/06/john-bolton-used-to-defend-executive-privilege-not-for-any-one-president-but-for-the-benefit-of-the-republic-now-he-wants-to-publish-classified-information/

Cartoon: Viva la Revolucion

By A.F. Branco

 

Click here for a higher level resolution version.

---

ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from RealClearPolitics.com, Betsy McCaughey lays out the case that China is covering up the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic:

China still hiding COVID-19's origins

By Betsy McCaughey

China is determined to block investigations of where COVID-19 came from. But worse, influential American scientists are going along with censoring any inquiry. They're declaring their "solidarity with the scientists and health professionals of China."

That's a deadly problem. Conquering this virus and devising a vaccine will require unbiased research, no matter where it leads. The best weapon to fight this virus is the truth. The biggest mistake is to limit scientific inquiry and pander to China. We need scientists to be scientists, not political censors.

When Australia called for a formal inquiry into the pandemic's origins, China explicitly threatened to boycott Australian imports, slapping 80% tariffs on barley and restrictions on beef. Countries got the message. The World Health Assembly, the legislative arm of WHO, settled for a watered-down resolution to investigate the global "response" to COVID-19, not its origins.

What we don't know about COVID-19 far exceeds what little is known. But research has already forced China to abandon its original tale that the virus leaped from wild animals to a human at the Huanan Seafood market in December. Some of these new findings will be essential for developing a vaccine and troubleshooting future viral disasters.

Findings by Cambridge University geneticist Peter Forster indicate three different strains of COVID-19 were circulating in China in the summer of 2019, each later predominating in a different part of the world.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the Broad Institute, a Harvard and MIT affiliate, indicate the virus was already capable of spreading to humans when it reached Wuhan.

Harvard scientists using aerial photographs of crammed hospital parking lots in Wuhan beginning in August 2019 speculate the virus hit that city months before China admits. China calls that suggestion "ridiculous."

European scientists indicate the disease invaded France, and possibly Italy, by December, though at the time it was thought to be flu.

Most controversially, a new study in Cambridge University's QRB Discovery by three vaccine researchers points to a segment in the virus's genetic code they say may have been engineered in a lab. They argue that the addition is what makes the virus contagious to humans, in addition to wild animals like bats.

These leads need to be investigated further, but instead, they are being denounced as "conspiracy theories." Not just by the Chinese Communist Party, but also by many scientists from prestigious American universities.

On Jan. 31, the World Health Organization praised China for transparency, a lie because they knew China was withholding information.

Then, on Feb. 19, scientists from the University of Chicago, Emory University and other institutions signed a letter in Lancet supporting the WHO director general's call for "unity" with China and condemning any research "suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."

They "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife." How could they know so soon?

The EcoHealth Alliance blasted the hypothesis of a lab-engineered genetic component as "the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation, and finger pointing" and warned it could become a platform for "posturing against China ... trade sanctions, and even reparations."

ABC News' medical correspondents claimed that "virologists around the globe have fiercely debunked" the theory. Many attacked it, for sure, but hardly disproved it.

Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and scientists writing a critique in the journal Nature Medicine argue that "if the new coronavirus had been manufactured in a lab, scientists most likely would have used the backbones of coronaviruses already known to cause serious diseases in humans" rather than inventing something new. "Most likely?" That's a guess, not proof.

On the other hand, infectivity can be the result of naturally occurring mutations. Scripps Research virologists reported June 12 that the COVID-19 virus currently circulating in the U.S. has mutated to be more contagious.

What we know is the virus was spreading months before China disclosed it and did not originate in Wuhan, contrary to China's original claim. Now we need to search for the uncensored truth.

To view online: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/17/hiding_covid-19s_origins_143470.html

 

---