Washington: President Donald Trump virtually pleaded with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at last year’s G-20 summit in Japan to help him win the 2020 US presidential election, former US national security adviser John Bolton has claimed in a new book.
The White House has said the forthcoming book by Bolton is “full of classified information” and the Department of Justice has sought a temporary restraining order blocking its release.
Excerpts from the book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, were carried by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
Published by Simon & Schuster, the book is slated to hit the stores on June 23.
Trump fired Bolton, one of the most hawkish voices in his inner circle, last year after a string of disagreements.
“He is a liar,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, adding that “everybody in the White House hated John Bolton.”
Trump told Fox News in an interview that Bolton disclosed “highly classified information.” “And he did not have approval,” the president said.
In his book, Bolton also charged that when Xi told Trump last year that China was building concentration camps for the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims, Trump said Xi should go ahead building the camps, “which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
In his book, Bolton, famous walrus moustache, doubts if the tough stand taken by Trump against China would last beyond the elections.
“Most important of all, will Trump’s current China pose last beyond election day? The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump. That is something to think about for those, especially China realists, who believe they know what he will do in a second term,” he wrote.
Bolton claims that Trump sought the Chinese president’s help in his reelection during a meeting in Osaka on June 29, 2019 on the sidelines of a G-20 summit. (PTI)