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Bolton Threatened over Publishing Book

reporter 1222 — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 08:09:32 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The White House has issued a formal threat to former US national security adviser John Bolton to keep him from publishing his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” sources familiar with the matter said.

In a letter to Bolton’s lawyer, a top official at the National Security Council wrote the unpublished manuscript of Bolton book “appears to contain significant amounts of classified information” and couldn’t be published as written.

The letter, which is dated January 23, said some of the information was classified at the “top secret” level, meaning it “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security.”

“The manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information,” the letter read, according to CNN.

The White House had no comment. Neither Bolton nor a spokesman for the publisher, Simon & Schuster, responded to a request for comment.

Later Wednesday, Bolton’s attorney Charles Cooper released a follow-up letter that he sent to the National Security Council about the manuscript.

“As you are no doubt aware, the House Managers in the Senate impeachment trial have made clear their intention to seek Ambassador Bolton’s testimony at trial, and although no one yet knows whether the Senate will subpoena him to testify, he is preparing for that possibility,” Cooper wrote in a Friday email to the official at the National Security Council.

“If he is called to testify, it seems certain that he will be asked questions that will elicit much of the information contained in the chapter of his manuscript dealing with his involvement in matters relating to Ukraine. We do not believe that any of that information could reasonably be considered classified, but given that Ambassador Bolton could be called to testify as early as next week, it is imperative that we have the results of your review of that chapter as soon as possible.”

In a statement accompanying the letter, Cooper added that he had “received no response whatever to my urgent request for the NSC’s immediate guidance as to any concerns it may have with respect to the chapter of the manuscript dealing with Ambassador Bolton’s involvement in matters relating to Ukraine.”

The letter comes in the midst of President Donald Trump attacking Bolton on Twitter, and Bolton’s lawyer accusing the White House of corrupting the vetting process for Bolton’s book by sharing the contents of the book with those outside the National Security Council’s Records Management Division.

Trump’s tweets attacking Bolton Wednesday morning suggested he knew the contents of the manuscript.

Reports from The New York Times suggest that Bolton’s book details a time last August when the President directly linked $391 million in security aid to Ukraine with that country’s government launching investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The President has repeatedly made unfounded and false claims about Joe Biden relating to Ukraine.

The President’s defense attorneys in his Senate impeachment trial have criticized the House impeachment managers for not producing any first-hand witnesses alleging that any quid pro quo came from the president himself.

Bolton has said he would be willing to testify in the Senate trial if subpoenaed. Trump has suggested that he might attempt to assert executive privilege and block Bolton’s testimony, though legal experts say the President’s tweets describing his conversations with Bolton about Ukraine might undermine any such assertion.

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Bolton testify at Trump impeachment; Dems

reporter 1222 — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 05:30:45 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The stakes over witness testimony at US President Donald Trump impeachment trial rose after a draft of a book from former national security adviser John Bolton appeared to undercut a key defense argument.

Bolton wrote in the forthcoming book that Trump told him that he wanted to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid from Ukraine until it helped him with politically charged investigations, including into Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Trump’s legal team has repeatedly insisted that the Republican president never tied the suspension of military assistance to the country to investigations that he wanted into Biden and his son.

The account immediately gave Democrats new fuel in their pursuit of sworn testimony from Bolton and other witnesses, a question expected to be taken up later this week by the Republican-led Senate. After Bolton situation, The impeachment trial resumed Monday afternoon with arguments from the defense team of Trump.

Bolton’s account was first reported by The New York Times. When the Times report went online Sunday night, the seven House Democratic managers immediately called on all senators to insist that Bolton be called as a witness and provide his notes and other relevant documents. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, issued the same call.

Trump denied the claims in a series of tweets early Monday. “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” Trump said in a tweet. “In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”

Trump said people could look at transcripts of his call and statements by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelinskiy that there was no pressure for such investigations to get the aid.

Bolton, who acrimoniously left the White House a day before Trump ultimately released the Ukraine aid on Sept. 11, has already told lawmakers that he is willing to testify, despite the president’s order barring aides from cooperating in the probe.

“Americans know that a fair trial must include both the documents and witnesses blocked by the President — that starts with Mr. Bolton,” the impeachment managers said in a statement.

While the Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to remove Trump from office, it is important for him to try to blunt the Democratic accusations to limit political damage to his bid for a second term.

The impeachment trial rules provide for a two-step process on whether to subpoena witness and documents, with an initial vote on whether to consider doing so and, if approved, subsequent votes to actually call witnesses or demand documents.

Democrats argue this could allow Republicans to have it both ways – allowing them to first vote “yes” on whether to proceed and then vote “no” on actually allowing witnesses or documents.

As a result, vulnerable Senate Republicans could make the case to moderates that they had voted in favor of witnesses in the first vote while avoiding alienating Trump supporters by refusing to actually call any in later votes.

If the Senate called witnesses or demanded documents, the trial could lengthen. If not, the Senate could vote toward the end of the week on whether to remove Trump from office.

If that were to happen the trial could be over before the first US voting contest takes place in Iowa on Feb. 3 and before Trump is scheduled to deliver the annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 4.

AP and Reuters contributed to this story.

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Zarif likens Pompeo and Bolton to ‘psychotic stalker’ too obsessed with Iran

reporter 1222 — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 12:43:28 +0000

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Tuesday likened U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton to “psychotic stalkers” who are extremely obsessed with Iran.

“While ordinarily it might be flattering, @SecPompeo’s and @AmbJohnBolton’s pure obsession with Iran is more and more like the behavior of persistently failing psychotic stalkers,” Zarif tweeted.

Zarif the U.S. is in fact “substituting a real foreign policy with Iran- obsession and -phobia.”

Speaking during a news conference with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi in Amman on Tuesday, Pompeo said the U.S. was “redoubling not only our diplomatic but our commercial efforts to put real pressure on Iran.”

He also said the U.S. decision to pull out troops from Syria would not jeopardize Washington’s efforts to counter threats in the region, which, he alleged, came from Iran and the Daesh terrorist group, Press TV reported.

“The most significant threats to the region are Daesh and the Islamic Revolution,” Pompeo said.

Bolton also claimed on Sunday that Iran poses a threat to the region through its “quest for deliverable nuclear weapons.”

“We’ve got the continuing threat of Iran’s quest for deliverable nuclear weapons,” Bolton said during a joint declaration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Bolton is obsessed with Iran: French official

reporter 1222 — Sat, 06 Oct 2018 07:10:05 +0000

“Bolton is obsessed with Iran, and everything else plays second fiddle,” said one senior official from France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, pleaded unsuccessfully with Trump to remain in the Iran nuclear deal during an April visit to the White House, Reuters reported.

In an article published on Thursday, Reuters reported that, “Bolton has had most success with Trump on Iran. He has played a central role in promoting the Trump administration’s efforts to create a security and political alliance with six (Persian) Gulf Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, in large part to help counter Iran’s expansion in the region.”

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