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Trump sought Xi’s help with re-election – John Bolton

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US President Donald Trump tried to get China’s Xi Jinping to help him secure re-election, ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book says.

Mr Bolton says Mr Trump wanted China to buy agricultural produce from US farmers, according to details of the forthcoming book previewed by US media.

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He also says Mr Trump “remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House”.

The Trump administration is trying to block the book from hitting shelves.

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Mr Bolton’s 577-page tome, The Room Where It Happened, is due to go on sale on 23 June.

But on Wednesday night, the Department of Justice sought an emergency order from a judge to stop the book’s release.

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The publisher, Simon & Schuster, said in a statement: “Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility.”

It said hundreds of thousands of copies of the book have already been distributed around the world and the injunction would accomplish nothing.

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Meanwhile, Mr Trump called in to a Fox News programme and said of Mr Bolton: “He broke the law. This is highly classified information and he did not have approval.”

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“He was a washed up guy,” the president added. “I gave him a chance.”

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The foreign policy hawk joined the White House in April 2018 and left in September the following year, saying he had decided to quit as national security adviser. President Trump, however, said he had fired Mr Bolton because he disagreed “strongly” with him.

On one hand, the account John Bolton offers in his new book should seem somewhat familiar.

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This is hardly the first time a former adviser or anonymous current aide to Donald Trump has offered anecdotes about a president seemingly uninterested in the details of governing and uninformed on basic issues of foreign policy. For nearly three-and-a-half years, there have been plentiful stories about a White House rife with backbiting and internal power struggles.

Mr Bolton’s book goes beyond this well-trodden ground, however, in painting a broad portrait of a president willing to bend foreign policy to advance his domestic and personal political agenda. This was the heart of the impeachment case congressional Democrats made against Trump in January.

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Mr Bolton confirms their allegations that the president wanted the withholding of military aid to pressure Ukraine to provide damaging information about Democratic rival Joe Biden. Mr Bolton adds that Trump’s dealings with China were also done with an eye on his re-election, and that he repeatedly intervened to assist friendly autocrats around the world.

Republicans suggest this is all the work of a disgruntled employee trying to sell books, while Democrats are already growling that Bolton should have volunteered these bombshells during the impeachment proceedings. That ship has sailed, of course, but Bolton’s book can still have a bite, distracting a presidential campaign struggling to find its footing less than five months before election day.

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What does Bolton allege about the meeting with Xi?

The allegations refer to a meeting between President Trump and President Xi at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June last year.

The Chinese president had complained that some US critics of China were calling for a new cold war, Mr Bolton said in an extract from the book published in the New York Times.

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He said Mr Trump assumed Mr Xi was referring to his Democratic opponents.

“Trump, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Mr Bolton said.

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“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

When Mr Xi agreed to make discussions on farm products a priority in trade talks, Mr Trump called him “the greatest leader in Chinese history”.

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Speaking on Wednesday evening, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer disputed Mr Bolton’s account, saying the request for help with re-election “never happened”.

Mr Bolton also mentions an earlier conversation at the summit’s opening dinner, in which they discussed the building of camps in China’s western Xinjiang region.

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Mr Trump said the construction should go ahead as it was “exactly the right thing to do”.

  • BBC
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