Trump asked China's Xi to help him win re-election, according to Bolton book

Washington: President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 US election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural imports from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects, according to a damning new account of life inside the Trump administration by former national security adviser John Bolton.

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that "Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

"He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China's economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win," Bolton writes.

"He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump's exact words but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."

The episode described by Bolton in his book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, bears striking similarities to the actions that resulted in Trump's impeachment after he sought to pressure the Ukrainian President to help dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance.

President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019.Credit: AP

The China allegation also comes amid ongoing warnings from US intelligence agencies about foreign election interference in November, as Russia did to favour Trump in 2016.

Bolton's 592-page memoir, obtained by The Washington Post, is the most substantive, critical dissection of the President from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and is a long-time contributor to Fox News. It portrays Trump as an "erratic" and "stunningly uninformed" commander-in-chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the President, his top advisers and foreign leaders.

The book is the subject of an escalating legal battle between the conservative foreign policy hand and the Justice Department, which has filed a lawsuit seeking to block its publication by alleging that it contains classified material. Bolton's lawyer has said the book does not contain classified material and that it underwent an arduous review process.

US President Donald Trump poses for a photo with Chinese President Xi Jinping.Credit: AP

Bolton describes the book as being based on both contemporaneous accounts and his own notes, and it includes numerous details of internal meetings and direct quotations attributed to Trump and others. Trump allies have already begun launching attacks on Bolton and his motives, including describing him as "Book Deal Bolton".

The request for electoral assistance from Xi is just one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favours or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the President and attempted to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.

In one May 2019 phone call, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a "brilliant display of Soviet-style propaganda" to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Putin's claims, Bolton writes, "largely persuaded Trump".

Russia's Vladimir Putin convinced Trump that Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido was like Hillary Clinton, Bolton wrote. Credit: Bloomberg

In May 2018, Bolton says, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan handed Trump a memo claiming innocence for a Turkish firm under investigation by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York for violating Iranian sanctions.

"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people," Bolton writes.

Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump's determination to do favours for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with Attorney-General William Barr in 2019 to discuss his behaviour. Bolton writes that Barr agreed he also was worried about the appearances created by the behaviour.

Donald Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton has written a memoir.Credit: AP

In his account, Bolton broadly confirms the outline of the impeachment case laid out by Democratic lawmakers and witnesses in House proceedings earlier this year, writing that Trump was fixated on a bogus claim that Ukraine tried to hurt him and was in thrall to unfounded conspiracy theories pushed by presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others.

Trump was impeached in January by the Democratic-controlled House of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, before being acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate the following month. Bolton resisted Democratic calls to testify without a subpoena.

Bolton is silent on the question of whether he believes Trump's actions related to Ukraine were impeachable and is deeply critical of how House Democrats managed the process.

But he writes that he found Trump's decision to hold up military assistance to pressure newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "deeply disturbing," and that he tried to work internally to counter it, reporting concerns to Barr and the White House Counsel's Office.

"I thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally and unacceptable as presidential behaviour," he writes.

Shortly after the claims were aired, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi in Hawaii — their first face-to-face meeting since last year.

Yang told Pompeo that Washington needed to respect Beijing's positions on key issues, halt its interference on matters such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang, and work to repair relations, the foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Yang said cooperation between the two countries was "the only correct choice".

Pompeo stressed "the need for fully-reciprocal dealings between the two nations," US State Department said in a statement. "He also stressed the need for full transparency and information sharing to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and prevent future outbreaks."

At the same time, Trump was signing legislation calling for sanctions against those responsible for repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, which prompted a threat of retaliation from Beijing.

Washington Post, Reuters

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