"When he was first indicted, Mr. Bolton sought to frame the case against him as part of a push by the president to misuse the Justice Department to punish his perceived political enemies."

"The case against Mr. Bolton, however, began in the first Trump administration and gained momentum during the Biden administration, as investigators gathered additional evidence. After the guilty plea, Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, compared the case to the 2023 indictment of President Trump, which accused him of mishandling classified information by keeping secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his first term. The judge overseeing the case against Mr. Trump, Aileen M. Cannon, dismissed those charges before it went to trial...."

From "John Bolton, Former Trump Adviser, Pleads Guilty in Classified Information Case/Mr. Bolton admitted to mishandling classified information and could face time in prison, in an inquiry that spanned the Trump and Biden administrations" (NYT).

"The investigation into President Trump’s former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration..."

"... when U.S. intelligence officials collected information that appeared to show that he had mishandled classified information, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The United States gathered data from an adversarial country’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case that remains open. While those searches have raised fresh questions about the extent to which Mr. Trump may be using the Justice Department and F.B.I. to try to punish those he dislikes, the new details of the case present a more complex chain of events. The disclosures suggest that a long-running investigation into Mr. Bolton’s activities changed over time, with some of the issues echoing past inquiries into the handling of national security secrets...."

From "John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government/It is not clear what country intercepted Mr. Bolton’s private emails, but the investigation into President Trump’s former national security adviser picked up momentum under the Biden administration" (NYT).

"FBI agents on Friday searched the Maryland home of former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton..."

"... as part of an investigation of whether he illegally possessed or shared classified information, according to two people familiar with the matter.... A blogger was also live-streaming the scene of cars with lights flashing outside the home...."

The Washington Post reports.

Should I add my tag "revenge" to this post?

Yes. This is clearly about revenge.

Yes, because it would only mean that the topic of revenge is in issue.

Yes, because it's spicy.

No. When in doubt, perform neutrality.

No. It pushes readers to think what they might not otherwise think.

No. You should presume that those in authority are acting for legitimate reasons.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"If the past is any guide, even with a full acquittal, Mr. Trump will be angry and vengeful, and will direct attacks..."

"... against everyone he perceives to be responsible for the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution.... Some of Mr. Trump’s former staff members who spent time with him after his previous investigations said that he was in no mood to celebrate after these purported victories but instead sought retribution.... And after surviving his first impeachment, in early 2020, for trying to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into investigating Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, Mr. Trump was in a mood so foul that it surprised some of his aides who were relieved the episode was over. He sat in his private dining room adjoining the Oval Office, scowling at the television and spewing expletives, according to a person with direct knowledge of the events.... The verdict of this trial will land in the middle of a presidential campaign, which gives the aftermath a new dynamic, especially if Mr. Trump is acquitted, said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.... 'He will display the sense of injury that he had to put up with it at all because if they couldn’t follow through with it then there was nothing there,' Mr. Bolton said...."

Write Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, in "Trump’s Post-Verdict Playbook: Anger and Retribution, Regardless of the Outcome/Former President Donald J. Trump has a history of attacking investigators, blaming President Biden and seeking vengeance on those who cross him" (NYT).

Message to jurors: Don't think that by by acquitting Trump you can expunge the depredations of the prosecutor and the judge... (and Biden?).... 

On the occasion of Nikki Haley's calling Vivek Ramaswamy "scum," I look into the history of "scum" in my archive.

1. October 23, 2019 — blogged here — Trump called his antagonists "human scum":

The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2019

2. On October 24, 2019, I wrote "Troubled by Trump's use of the phrase 'human scum,' I decided to trace its usage, over the years..." This post traces the use of the phrase "human scum" in the NYT archive, beginning in 1897. I note: "The epithet rarely appeared until 2003, when it began coming up repeatedly in statements from the North Korean government. The first person called 'human scum' by the North Koreans was John Bolton."

2. In December 2017, according to The Daily Beast, Facebook was banning women who call men "scum" (because it, supposedly, "classifies white men as a protected group"). I wrote: "I don't support what Facebook is doing, but I do think the use of the word 'scum' warrants a historical note on 'SCUM' — The Society for Cutting Up Men. The author of 'The SCUM Manifesto,' Valerie Solanas, wasn't joking....'The Manifesto argues that SCUM [a revolutionary vanguard of women] should employ sabotage and direct action tactics... "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."'" Solanas became famous for shooting Andy Warhol.

3. On December 11, 2020, I blogged about a Wisconsin State Journal headline "Sen. Ron Johnson called 'delusional scum' for considering challenge to election." I asked "why is the fact that somebody hurled one particular epithet the subject of a headline? If the insult-hurler isn't important enough to name in the headline, why put one nasty insult in a headline?"

4. Back in January 2015, I blogged the immortal words of John McCain: "Get outta here you lowlife scum!"

5. On May 24, 2022, I happened to revisit Hunter S. Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon. Thompson wrote: "Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

I think this is a great set of TikToks. I think people are going to like them. I've got them trained now to talk about whether they like them. None of this ooh, the Chinese government. You just gave your telephone number to Donald Trump. Truth Social. Call me, Donald. 

Include me in your group text. Let me know when you're having your next insurrection.

Text me, Donald. Include me in the insur-text-ion.

The real one, this time. 

We're going full John Bolton. 

Never go full John Bolton.

"Tapper didn’t immediately stop Bolton, who worked in the last four Republican administrations, when he admitted orchestrating coups abroad."

"Eventually, though, the CNN host asked his guest to elaborate, and Bolton pointed to the attempted effort in 2019 by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro. (At the time, Bolton publicly said the plot, which the Trump administration supported, was 'not a coup.') When Tapper asked him if 'there’s other stuff you’re not telling me,' Bolton played coy: 'I think I’m sure there is.'"

From "John Bolton Admitted on National TV That He Helped Plan Coups" (NY Magazine).

Tapper: I don’t know if I agree with you with all due respect. One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup
Bolton: I disagree with that as somebody who has helped plan coups, not here but other places… pic.twitter.com/jK61a0e3lV

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 12, 2022

"But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton..."

"... the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath. 'But what about the policies?' I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred."

From "Tribalism has come to the West/Hostile and polarised, today's America reminds me of my Somalian clan" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who worked at AEI at the time of that conversation).

"Where is the evidence?"

NEW: Former National Security Adviser John Bolton urges GOP leadership to "explain to our voters... that in fact Trump has lost the election and that these claims of election fraud are baseless." https://t.co/z6SZ06zbP3 pic.twitter.com/GyXya7xYAv

— ABC News (@ABC) November 15, 2020

"I can’t prove the negative that he never said those things. The president has a habit of disparaging people. He ends up denigrating almost everybody..."

"... that he comes in contact with whose last name is not Trump. I was simply responding to what I thought the main point of the Atlantic article that at the critical point Saturday morning when the decision was made not to go to Aisne-Marne that he made the disparaging remarks, and he did not."

Said John Bolton, quoted in "John Bolton denies claim Trump disparaged fallen American soldiers in France: 'Simply false'/'The main issue was whether or not weather conditions permitted the president to go'" (Fox News).

If Trump had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the dead were "losers" and "suckers," John Bolton would have written an entire chapter about it in his book.

.@AmbJohnBolton told me today that if @realDonaldTrump had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the interred heroes were “losers” and “suckers”, he would have written an entire chapter about it in his book #TheRoomWhereItHappened

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) September 4, 2020

Oh, yeah... Bolton... nobody talks about Bolton anymore.

Except at Axios... they're trying to bring him back: "Bolton's hidden aftershocks/The news media has largely moved on, but foreign government officials remain fixated on John Bolton's memoir, 'The Room Where It Happened.'..."

You probably won't read that — because you've moved on, right? But there's stuff like "European officials, who have spent three and a half years fretting that Trump would withdraw the U.S. from NATO, are treated to a hair-raising account of just how close Trump came to announcing he would do just that."

"He’s the only man I think I ever met -- I knew him for a year -- I don’t think I ever saw him smile once. I said to him, ‘John, do you ever smile?’ And it tells you something about somebody."

Trump, talking about John Bolton, at a Town Hall on Fox News yesterday.

ADDED: It's what he said right before that that caught my attention and actually shocked me enough to click it off. I transcribed this part myself:

But I'll tell you, he was good for one thing. Everyone thought he was crazy. Because all he wants to do is bomb people. He'll fight Russia. Let's fight Russia. Let's fight China. Let's take them on at the same time. He's crazy. When I walked into a room with him, I knew that. When they saw Bolton, they always gave me what I wanted, because they said, Trump's going to drop bombs on me. He's got this maniac with him. So, in a way, he helped me in terms of a negotiation. 

That's where I clicked off, but I turned it back on this morning to do the transcription and here's how it continues:

But seriously...

But seriously! So he was kidding??



I don't kid.

Yikes. I slept on it, disturbed, then come back this morning and catch the "but seriously"...

But seriously, he didn't do a good job. He wasn't smart. He wasn't sharp. And he's the only man I think I ever met -- I knew him for a year -- I don’t think I ever saw him smile once. I said to him, ‘John, do you ever smile?’ And it tells you something about somebody."

Shoot horse?

I confess I didn't realize how dumb John Bolton was until I read his ABC interview transcript this morning. He's like Gary Larson's horse veterinarian who only has one treatment: "shoot horse." And apparently he thinks that's a "strategy" that Trump lacks.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 22, 2020

Here's the Gary Larson cartoon.

Here's the ABC interview transcript. I've read the cartoon. I've skimmed the (long) transcript) and don't really see the analogy.

Here's something Adams says about analogies in his book "Loserthink":

Analogies are great when used for humor. They are also handy for describing a new concept. But I try to avoid using analogies in the service of persuasion or prediction because analogies are not good for that. The target of your persuasion will simply pick it apart for not being exactly the same as the situation you are debating. If you live to be a million, you’ll never see anyone win a debate with an analogy.

Good use of an analogy (describing something): His posture reminded me of macaroni.

Bad use of an analogy (persuasion and prediction): We should disband the U.S. Postal Service because the Hitler Youth movement started with cool uniforms too. That’s where it’s all headed.

As bad as analogies are for persuading, they are even worse for predicting. If someone tells you a male lion looks like a gigantic tan-colored house cat with a neck beard, it doesn’t help you predict how the lion will work out as a house pet.

"Bolton is extremely famous for his fervent hawkery, including on the Iraq war. If Trump bothered to do a cursory Google search on Bolton before appointing him..."

"... to the most powerful national security position in his administration, he’d have turned up headlines like 'John Bolton: No regrets about toppling Saddam.' Sadly, there was too much good stuff [on] television in the days leading up to Bolton’s nomination to do that search. Trump does not seem to realize how bad it makes him sound that he never bothered to ask what he later identified as the key question about the worldview of his own national security adviser."

From "Trump: I Didn’t Realize Bolton Supported Iraq War Until After I Hired Him" by Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine). Chait is reading the WSJ interview in which Trump says:

John Bolton's book "has been written with so little discernible attention to style and narrative form that he apparently presumes an audience that is hanging on his every word."

According to the review in the NYT, written by Jennifer Szalai.

... Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged....

"As the book nears publication and details spill out, many congressional Democrats quickly assailed Mr. Bolton for not telling his story during the impeachment proceedings and instead saving it for his $2 million book."

"Mr. Bolton explains his position in the epilogue, saying he wanted to wait to see if a judge would order one of his deputies to testify over White House objections. Once the House impeached Mr. Trump over the Ukraine matter, Mr. Bolton volunteered to testify in the Senate trial that followed if subpoenaed. But Senate Republicans voted to block new testimony by him and any other witnesses even after The New York Times reported that his forthcoming book would confirm the quid pro quo. Some of those Republican senators said that even if Mr. Bolton was correct, it would not be enough in their minds to make Mr. Trump the first president in American history convicted and removed from office. Mr. Bolton blames House Democrats for being in a rush rather than waiting for the court system to rule on whether witnesses like him should testify, and he faults them for narrowing their inquiry to just the Ukraine matter rather than building a broader case with more examples of misconduct by the president. 'Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome,' he writes."
From "Five Takeaways From John Bolton’s Memoir 'The Room Where It Happened' describes Mr. Bolton’s 17 turbulent months at President Trump’s side through a multitude of crises and foreign policy challenges" by Peter Baker (NYT).

ADDED:

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. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020

"John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, wanted to write a book."

"He knew that the White House would do everything it could to stop him. He hired a flashy white-shoe law firm to handle the prepublication review process required by the nondisclosure agreement he signed when he got his security clearance. As expected, the White House weaponized the prepublication review process against him to keep him from publishing. If he published without approval, it said, he could face severe legal consequences. Then his lawyer, Chuck Cooper, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week intended to put public pressure on the White House. In it, Cooper volunteered that Bolton had violated both his NDA and perhaps a few criminal laws, including the Espionage Act. Now, even if Bolton’s book is never released, he is facing stiff penalties. As unforced legal errors go, that’s a doozy...."

From "Here’s How John Bolton’s Lawyer Just Threw Him Under the Bus/If you can be prosecuted for keeping a classified document in your garage, you can be prosecuted for giving it to your lawyer" (The Daily Beast).

"For a guy who couldn’t get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn’t get approved for anything since, 'begged' me for a non Senate approved job..."

"... which I gave him despite many saying 'Don’t do it, sir,' takes the job, mistakenly says 'Libyan Model' on T.V., and many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?"

Tweets President Trump a little while ago (1, 2).

I like his mild tone there. It's refreshing. To me, it's more convincing than the harsher name-calling. I appreciate that you didn't call him, say, Bolton the Snake... but... by the way... You knew he was a snake.



ADDED: The next thing I read feels like an answer to Trump's "Who would do this?" — "The Method in John Bolton’s Madness" by Jonathan Stevenson, "a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival [who] was the National Security Council director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013":

Why can't John Bolton's publisher just release the book ahead of schedule so we're not subjected to second-hand reports of what's in it?

Here's the book (in Kindle form), on Amazon, scheduled for release on March 17th. Yes, there are commercial interests here, but there are overriding national interests... unless there are not.

So which is it? Like a lot of other people, I'm trying to extract the real meaning of the NYT article, "Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says/Drafts of the book outline the potential testimony of the former national security adviser if he were called as a witness in the president’s impeachment trial."

We're haggling and agonizing about whether Bolton can testify at the impeachment trial, as if he's a crucial repository of information that can only be delivered through live testimony, but that book exists. It's just being withheld — withheld and teased, through people who are very antagonistic to Trump.

It reminds me of the way Trump antagonists began this impeachment process with inflammatory reports of what Trump said in the Ukraine phone call. But there was a transcript of that phone call, and Trump changed the conversation about it by releasing the transcript.

Release the damned book!

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.... The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

So, the book is already circulating to outsiders as part of the review process, and the White House is being given an opening to assert executive privilege and suppress all or part of the book. Everything will still come out, one way or another. It's already dribbling out, in a distorted form.

The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book’s contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said Sunday night.

Trump had the power to release the transcript of the Ukraine phone call, but it's not so easy to release somebody else's book. There's a big commercial interest here, and it seems that Bolton's cashing in on his intimacy with the President is more important that serving the people as we are subjected to this impeachment ordeal. The manuscript is out there, and many people are reading it, but it's the pre-publication review process, and — big surprise — it's leaking. Well, that's to be expected, and now we're reading the leaks as the NYT chooses to present them, presumably in the hope of opening up the Senate trial. And from Bolton's camp, what we hear is crying over corruption of the process — not the Senate trial process, the pre-publication review process.

If the pre-publication review process is more important than giving us what's in the book while the Senate trial is going on, then I'm guessing what's in the book is nothing we haven't already heard about Trump and Ukraine. And if the White House is the source of the leak — which is the story from the Bolton camp — that's all the more reason to think the book is nothing special.