Donald Trump told The Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward “the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them.” Maybe these dictators remind the president of his father. Regardless, he likes their actions: murdering journalists, military responses to peaceful protests, and persecuting their “adversaries.” Actually, POTUS has begun to copy some of them.
Forner National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote a book that the White House tried to suffocate through inaction, holding it in the nether world of approval red tape. Bolton had enough and published it anyway when the torrent of tell-all books was just getting started.
Trump’s new fixer Attorney General William Barr Department of Justice (DOJ) nudged federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into Bolton’s book. So a federal grand jury sent subpoenas to the publisher of the book Simon & Schuster and Bolton’s literary agent Javelin.
The subpoenas requested all communications the publisher had with Bolton. The book embarrassed the president, which was a big mistake. The DOJ filed its lawsuit to block the book’s publication. The emergency request failed when the federal judge rejected it. The judge did continue a civil inquiry, though, regarding the author mishandling classified information, Talking Points Memo reported.
DC District Judge Royce Lambert came down hard on Bolton for moving ahead to publish his book absent a final notice from the administration. He said it “raises grave national security concerns.”
The specific information he was referencing discussed the president trying to get China to help him get elected and committing to “Turkish leader Reccep Tayyip Erdogan that he would shut down a Manhattan federal criminal investigation into a Turkish bank.”
Some attorneys affiliated with the “National Security Council and Justice Department were concerned that opening a criminal case would be seen as a political act.”
Attorney General Bill Barr has already tried to get charges dropped against Michael Flynn, who was active in the Trump campaign, and his long-time friend and self-described “Dirty Trickster” Roger Stone.
The New York Times took a deep look at The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. It wrote that the book had “clotted prose,” “garbled argument,” and “sanctimonious defensiveness:”
‘When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part — a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often.’
The Times called Bolton “an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself:”
‘Or maybe it merely reflects an uncomfortable realization that he’s stuck between two incompatible impulses: the desire to appear as courageous as those civil servants who bravely risked their careers to testify before the House; and the desire to appease his fellow Republicans, on whom his own fastidiously managed career most certainly depends. It’s a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about “the intellectually lazy” by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.’
Twitter world went nuts after they discovered Bolton’s problem. Take a look at some of our favorites below:
Based on this picture…. Looks like he just disclosed the Colonel’s secret recipe. pic.twitter.com/7oo0Tv5fZZ
— Brian (@shepter_brian) September 15, 2020
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
