Analysis as Bolton sheds light on Trump presidency – Yahoo News

President Donald Trump pleaded with Chinas Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit to help his reelection prospects, according to a scathing new book by former Trump adviser John Bolton. (June 17)

ZEKE MILLER: What is, you know, obvious from reading the book is the detailed notes that he kept, the first-person contemporaneous account of the inner workings of the Trump administration through a number of known and unknown scandals that he is-- that he's writing about. So it's a-- you know, in one sense, he is just providing an inside account, a contemporaneous account of the things we've all watched play out over the last two or three years. And the other, he's revealing and making allegations of some other unknown claims-- charges against the president that could be something that, whether it be congressional investigators would look at but also certainly could be a factor in this year's presidential election.

Well, one of the most significant allegations in the book comes-- stems from the president's meeting with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping last June in Osaka, Japan and alongside the G20 meeting where Bolton, then National Security Advisor, recounts how he watched the president, in his words, plead with Xi to cut a deal with the United States on trade-- this is at a time when the two nations were in the middle of a trade war that was taking a toll on both their economies-- and encouraging the Chinese government to buy more US farm products with the explicit purpose of helping his own re-election campaign. And he called that a stunning revelation.

So far, we haven't heard much from the White House on the substantive allegations brought to bear by Bolton so far. White House officials have tried to impugn Bolton's credibility, in one case sending out an email to reporters listing all the times Democrats said that Bolton wasn't necessarily the most credible.

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Analysis as Bolton sheds light on Trump presidency - Yahoo News