President Trump said the “dumbest” comment John Bolton ever made hurt the administration’s ability to deal with North Korea.
The president lashed out at his former national security adviser on Thursday after excerpts from Bolton’s book were leaked and published by the media. His tweets also come as relations between North and South Korea deteriorate. The hermit nation even bombed an inter-Korean liaison office on Tuesday.
“When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said that he looked at the “Libyan Model” for North Korea, all hell broke out. Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along with very well, went “ballistic”, just like his missiles — and rightfully so. … He didn’t want Bolton anywhere near him,” Trump said in a tweet.
“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 & there!” the president added.
[Byron York’s Daily memo: John Bolton’s lonely book tour]
….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 & there!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020
Bolton made the “Libya model” comment about North Korea in an April 2018 interview.
“What we want to see from them is evidence that it’s real and not just rhetoric,” Bolton said in the interview with CBS News. “One thing that Libya did that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers into all their nuclear-related sites. So it wasn’t a question of relying on international mechanisms. We saw them in ways we had never seen before.”
Following the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, fearing his own stability, began allowing international inspectors into the country and dismantling weapons of mass destruction programs. The United States scaled back sanctions in return. Gadhafi was killed by his own people less than a decade later during the 2011 Arab Spring.
North Korea fired back at the U.S. over Bolton’s remark, with state-run media characterizing the strategy as “an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq, which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers.”
“It is absolutely absurd to dare compare [North Korea], a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development,” a statement from state-run media said at the time. Trump also pushed back on Bolton’s comments at the time, saying that “the Libyan model is not one that we have at all.”
Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, served as Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September of last year.
Excerpts from Bolton’s upcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, were leaked and widely reported by the media on Wednesday. In the memoir, he claimed Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if China could help his reelection campaign by purchasing agricultural products, which Trump allegedly said would help him garner support from farmers. Bolton also wrote that Trump once said journalists should be jailed or executed.
In his book, Bolton claimed Trump viewed his summer 2018 Singapore summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un as “an exercise in publicity” and cared little about the details of denuclearization, which was the stated goal of the talks.
“Trump told … me he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press conference to declare victory and then get out of town,” he wrote.
Bolton also alleged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once wrote denigrating notes about Trump to Bolton. In the memoir, he claimed Pompeo wrote that talks with Kim on North Korea had a “zero probability of success” and said Trump was “full of shit.”
Trump denied the veracity of Bolton’s book in another series of Thursday morning tweets and claimed his former national security adviser was “disgruntled.”
“Wacko John Bolton’s ‘exceedingly tedious’ (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war,” he tweeted just after midnight Thursday. “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!”
The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block its publication, with the Justice Department arguing it contains classified information. With the book set for release next week, the Justice Department filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on Wednesday.
