How mad is John Bolton?
by digby
... or maybe I should ask whether or not Bolton, regardless of his noxious ideology, has a shred of integrity. I honestly don't know.
But he knows things:
White House efforts to limit access to President Donald Trump's conversations with foreign leaders extended to phone calls with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the matter.
Those calls -- both with leaders who maintain controversial relationships with Trump -- were among the presidential conversations that aides took remarkable steps to keep from becoming public.
In the case of Trump's call with bin Salman, officials who ordinarily would have been given access to a rough transcript of the conversation never saw one, according to one of the sources. Instead, a transcript was never circulated at all, which the source said was highly unusual, particularly after a high-profile conversation.
The call — which the person said contained no especially sensitive national security secrets — came as the White House was confronting the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence assessments said came at the hand of the Saudi government.
With Putin, access to the transcript of at least one of Trump's conversations was also tightly restricted, according to a former Trump administration official.
It's not clear if aides took the additional step of placing the Russian phone calls in the same highly secured electronic system that held a now-infamous phone call with Ukraine's president and which helped spark a whistleblower complaint made public this week, though officials confirmed calls aside from the Ukraine conversation were placed there.
The conversations between Trump and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and the crown prince, widely known as MBS, were kept very secret, several sources with knowledge of the calls told CNN.
There were no transcripts made of the phone conversations between Trump and the Saudi king or crown prince to prevent leaks, both a former White House official and a source familiar with the calls told CNN. This is considered very unusual in how previous administrations have dealt with keeping record phone calls with world leaders.
Typically, there would be several senior officials listening in to a call with an important foreign leader and then a transcript of the call would be circulated to those officials.
Only Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton would be in the room for them, the former White House official said.
I think we probably know what Trump said to Mohammed bin Salman. He said, "good for you, Khashoggi was a disloyal prick and he deserved what he got. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this unfair witch hunt by the fake news media."
They are both bloodthirsty assholes.
Putin? Who knows? He's had a bunch of private chats. He could be making promises, telling him he thinks his authoritarian ways are awesome, setting up a big business deal for when he gets out of office or, very likely, spilling secrets to impress him. It could be anything. His relationship with Putin is bizarre in the extreme and nobody really understands it. It could be a simply as childish defiance in the face of everyone knowing that Putin helped him get elected or it could be some kind of kompromat. It doesn't matter. His behavior is unhinged and dangerous.
It may just be ego that makes Bolton come forward, but if he wants to rescue his reputation (a very long shot, I realize) he might want to think about getting on the right side of history for once.
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