Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked former national security adviser John Bolton on Thursday night in response to the ex-Trump official’s tell-all book, which recalled multiple instances of Pompeo disparaging President Donald Trump behind his back.
“I’ve not read the book, but from the excerpts I’ve seen published, John Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods,” Pompeo said in a statement. “It is both sad and dangerous that John Bolton’s final public role is that of a traitor who damaged America by violating his sacred trust with its people.”
“To our friends around the world: you know that President Trump’s America is a force for good in the world,” he added.
Excerpts of Bolton’s yet-to-published book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” published by several news outlets reveal how Pompeo often grew frustrated at Trump’s damaging foreign policy blunders.
One notable account in Bolton’s memoir, as reported by the New York Times, describes Pompeo’s disgust with Trump’s infamous meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in 2018, during which the secretary of state slipped Bolton a note saying Trump “is so full of shit.”
According to the New York Times, Bolton also confirms in his book that Pompeo was at the meeting when Trump when the President stated he didn’t want to send congressionally approved aid to Ukraine until the country had sent him damaging material on his political rivals. That pressure campaign became the basis for Trump’s impeachment, but both Bolton and Pompeo refused to testify in the impeachment hearings.
Some of former national security adviser’s accounts of Pompeo and Trump’s relationship waded into the truly ridiculous: Per the Washington Post’s report on the book, Bolton recalls an incident in which Trump tried to get Pompeo to deliver a CD of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” album that Trump had signed to Kim Jong Un. The gesture was apparently meant to be a joke about how Trump used to call the North Korean leader “little rocket man” before they became friendly with one another.
“Getting this CD to Kim remained a high priority for several months,” Bolton wrote.
