Former national security adviser John Bolton said Monday he believes President Donald Trump committed several impeachable offenses, but Democratic congressional leaders doomed their effort to remove him from office by rushing the process for partisan purposes.
Bolton told a Florida group in an online presentation that Trump's business and re-election concerns drive not only his dealings with Ukraine, which led to his impeachment by the House, but also with China, Turkey and other countries.
He said he would have voted to remove the president for his Ukraine dealings, but not delve into specifics. Bolton, a longtime adviser to Republican presidents, told the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, a nonpartisan organization that meets monthly to hear from prominent newsmakers, that life inside Trump's White House was like “living in a pinball machine.”
“You need to have strategic vision. It certainly helps to have philosophical foundations and you have to think through pros and cons of different policies. Almost none of that happened with President Trump,” said Bolton, who was promoting his book, “The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir."
Trump "does not have a basic philosophy. He is not a conservative Republican. I don't mean to say he is a liberal Democrat. He is just not anything,” said Bolton, who served as Trump's national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. The president says he fired Bolton; Bolton says he resigned.
Bolton, who was being interviewed by local TV anchorman Michael Williams, gave his most searing critiques regarding impeachment for congressional Democrats, saying they pushed their effort in a “rushed, inadequate, excessively partisan way.”
The Democrats weren't interested in learning the full truth, Bolton said, they just wanted to harm Trump's re-election chances, making it impossible to get any significant Republican support.
Bolton said the Democrats' claim that they plowed ahead knowing their effort was doomed in the Senate because it would curtail Trump's future actions is wrong. He said Trump's acquittal will make him less circumspect if he wins in November.
“The whole thing ended up completely backward of where the Democrats said they wanted," Bolton said.
Bolton, 71, is a longtime foreign policy hardliner who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has called for U.S. military action against Iran, North Korea and other countries over their attempts to build or procure nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
He was President George W. Bush's United Nations ambassador for 16 months after serving as a State Department arms negotiator and in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Bolton said Trump does not read the national security briefing presidents receive daily and during the two or three weekly in-person briefings he receives from security and military officials, Trump spends most of his time talking rather than listening and asking questions.