Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

He really is that stupid.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

It’s a doggy dog world.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

The problem people have with Biden’s age is the color of the VPs skin.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / The Book Salesman

The Book Salesman

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Here’s an angle I hadn’t seen on the Bolton book bombshell (via Digby)

We don’t know how this manuscript came into the New York Times’ hands, but the paper claims that Bolton shared drafts with close associates and delivered one to the White House to determine whether it contains classified information as is usual practice. While the motive behind leaking it is unclear, it stands to reason that Bolton may have feared that the White House would withhold the book on national security grounds after hearing the president say this in Davos last week:

The problem with John is that it’s a national security problem. You know, you can’t have somebody who’s at national security — and, if you think about it, John, he knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader, and it’s not very positive, and then I have to deal on behalf of the country? It’s going to be very hard.

That sounds very much like a rationale Trump’s lawyers were testing out to keep Bolton’s book from seeing the light of day.

Yeah, it sure does. So, maybe Bolton orchestrated the leak to prevent the Trump administration from quashing his book on national security grounds? That’s a lot more plausible to me than Bolton’s being motivated by patriotism. Every single one of Trump’s low-quality hires have failed that test.

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    trollhattan

    Whatever funhouse I find myself occupying while pondering Trumpian torpedoing of John Bolton with concern, where’s the exit, please?

  2. 2.

    Ella in New Mexico

    YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEPYEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP

    Also, I do think he doesn’t want to go down in history tied to their typhoid and rat-infested smoking pile of shit of a ship

    He’ll go down on his OWN crappy ship, thank you…

  3. 3.

    MJS

    Makes sense. Bolton has to have seen the exposure and book sales for Trump-hating Republicans (like Rick Wilson), and decided he didn’t want to risk losing all of that.

  6. 6.

    artem1s

    makes sense that he would offer his availability as a witness for the same reasons.

    Wonder if there are others who wanted to jump on the book gravy train that will now want to go on record before Trump tries to slam the National Security door in their faces?  As always, the GOP won’t do the right thing because it’s right, but if there is a profit in it for them, they will stampede over each other in an effort to jump on that bandwagon.

  8. 8.

    HRH mistermix, Lord Bombay Sapphire, Duke of Schweppes

    Cue the chorus of say it isn’t so.  Though, if all of his prior warmongering and constant wrongness couldn’t keep him off the TeeVee, why should this?

  10. 10.

    MattF

    I think one can assume that Bolton has thought this through pretty carefully, certainly more carefully than either Trump or Trump’s lawyers. As I said in an earlier thread, I’m no Bolton fan. But he’s a formidable adversary, and kneecapping Trump is his primary goal.

  11. 11.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Left NPR on as they go live to the Senate and I’m hearing a man invoke “the teachings of Jesus Christ echoing down the corridors of history”. Any of our Libertarians or Constitutional scholars on TV want to comment on that?

    Now we’re wishing John Roberts a happy birthday and I feel one of my occasional spasms of fondness for Bernie.

  12. 12.

    JGabriel

    Combover Caligula via Betty Cracker @ Top:

    John, he knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader, and it’s not very positive, and then I have to deal on behalf of the country?

    This is complete bullshit – every leader in the world already knows what Trump says about them behind their backs, due to every gov’t in the world tapping the unsecured phone he insists on using to call world leaders and his corporate “friends”.

    As far as foreign gov’ts go, Trump has no secrets.

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Let them fight

    Senator Kelly Loeffler @ SenatorLoeffler
    After 2 weeks, it’s clear that Democrats have no case for impeachment. Sadly, my colleague
    @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame. The circus is over. It’s time to move on! #gapol

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: some background on the recently appointed (by the guy who rigged his own election against Stacey Abrams) Senator Loeffler

    n 2002, Loeffler joined Intercontinental Exchange, a commodity and financial service provider, in investor relations. After marrying the firm’s CEO Jeffrey Sprecher in 2004, a courtship described by Sprecher as her biggest risk “because if it didn’t work out, she’d be on the short end of the stick,” she was eventually promoted to senior vice president of investor relations and corporate communications…. She became the chief executive officer (CEO) of Bakkt, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange, in 2018.[13]

    According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, Loeffler and her husband have donated $3.2 million to political committees. While the majority of these donations have gone to the Republican Party, some donations have gone to Democrats, including Representative David Scott (GA–13), who received $10,200.[14] Loeffler donated $750,000 to Restore Our Future, a Super PAC supporting former Governor Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.[1] The National Republican Senatorial Committee received $247,500 from Loeffler and her husband to boot.[14]

    the trumplicans are bigly populist

  18. 18.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just heard on MSNBC there’s a rumor that there are a “large group, as many as ten Republican Senators” that are thinking of pushing for witnesses.

    “United they Stand”as a strategy to avoid being picked out of the water one by one by TrumpTwitter Fire?

    Also, listening to this fucking JOKE Ken Starr right now, expounding on Congress not having too low a bar for impeachable offenses so as not to damage the President’s ability to do his job makes me wish for an invisibility cloak so I could track him down, follow him every where he goes and repeatedly kick him in the balls for like 24 hours.

  19. 19.

    Gin & Tonic

    But Bolton has already been paid – that’s why they call it an “advance.” Even if the Trump admin somehow succeeds in quashing it, that’s the publisher’s problem, not Bolton’s.

  20. 20.

    Barbara

    Of course, Bolton “orchestrated” the release of the draft to the media while simultaneously being able to deny that “he” disclosed anything to anyone. No one said that NYT got the thing “directly” from Bolton.

  21. 21.

    JGabriel

    Senator Kelly Loeffler @ SenatorLoeffler (via Jim, Foolish Literalist):

    … @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left

    Right. Because all those Utahan Mormon Lefties must be weighing mightily on Romney’s … conscience?

  25. 25.

    MJS

    @Gin & Tonic: He craves attention, too. If his book is quashed, not only can’t it be sold, he can’t go on TV to talk about what’s in it and, before you know it, he becomes completely irrelevant, now that he’s burned his Fox News bridge.

  26. 26.

    Aleta

    So, maybe Bolton orchestrated the leak to prevent the Trump administration from quashing his book on national security grounds?

    Marcy Wheeler suggested something along those  lines yesterday, about the possibility of Bolton’s orchestration, along with some pure speculation.

    John Bolton may lack the courage of Marie Yovanovitch, Jennifer Williams, Fiona Hill, or Alex Vindman. But he learned the art of bureaucratic murder from the master, Dick Cheney.

    And so it is that after the President’s lawyers have already laid out their defense, it magically happened that NYT learned the damning details about Ukraine in the draft of Bolton’s book that would make his testimony in the impeachment trial monumental.

    …

    The details I most relish — not least because Dick Cheney hurt the country using his bureaucratic skills but included none of them in his autobiographical novel — are these bureaucratic details.

    ( Quotes from the NY :

    ” … …  .

    White House officials … said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.”)

    Bolton has notes. And “close associates” of his have drafts of the manuscript.

    Bill Barr may be sending FBI agents out to pick up Bolton’s notes as they went to pick up Jim Comey’s memos detailing Trump’s damning behavior, but at this point, I think Bolton could instead send them to NARA to comply with the Presidential Records Act. And if Barr goes after Bolton, I assume his friends will release the drafts.

    Plus, there are several other ways this can get out. Bolton has just won himself an invitation to testify to SDNY about Rudy (and Pompeo may have as well). The House could go after Bolton for investigations of everyone else he implicated — Pompeo, Barr, Mulvaney — all of whom deserve to be impeached themselves.

     

    emptywheel  @emptywheel

    In other words, SDNY has reason to subpoena the manuscript and notes, too, since they go to the question of what relationship existed between Rudy’s other clients and US policy.

  27. 27.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    @Gin & Tonic: 

    I don’t know if he has a realistic chance of earning out the advance (and thus making more money in royalties), but he has zero chance of earning out the advance if the book gets squashed.

  28. 28.

    Wjs

    The entire Trump Regime is a low quality hire, very well said.

    It has never been an administration because it is not there to run the US government. They are stealing everything and they know Democrats will have to spend the next decade fixing everything.

  29. 29.

    sukabi

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    Also, listening to this fucking JOKE Ken Starr right now, expounding on Congress not having too low a bar for impeachable offenses so as not to damage the President’s ability to do his job 

    That’s rich coming from the asshole that spent almost 2 years and $70mm on investigations into the Clintons that eventually ended up in Monica Lewinsky’s panties for lack of anything else.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @JGabriel:

    Right. Because all those Utahan Mormon Lefties must be weighing mightily on Romney’s … conscience?

    It’s pretty clear that in modern Republican parlance, “the left” means “anyone to the left of me”.

  38. 38.

    Bill Arnold

    There is also the possibility (TTL reminded by palmerreport) that, depending on timing of the delivery of the manuscript to the White House, that one input into D.J.Trump’s decision to order a political assassination(/act of war) was that it might appease John Bolton, who really really really wants regime change in Iran, and delay any testimony until after an impeachment acquittal. If John Bolton believes this (and it’s pretty plausible if the timing is right), then he might be a bit miffed that the war fizzled. (Which was (at least) a combination of no immediate American fatalities during the limited Iranian response, and the downing by Iranian anti-aircraft missiles of a civilian airliner. (fuck fuck fuck on the later… :-( I hope the inquiry is made fully transparent by the Iranians. ))
    A DJT electoral college victory in 2016 led us to a warmongering War Walrus as NATSEC advisor.

  40. 40.

    Immanentize

    Wonkette:

    So, you mean to tell us, after an impeachment inquiry and trial where we’ve gotten one consistent version of the story of Donald Trump’s Ukraine crimes, that John Bolton’s book also too confirms that version of the story exactly and confirms Bolton’s status as a firsthand witness to the whole scheme? No one could have seen that one coming, and by no one, we mean everyone.

  41. 41.

    Brachiator

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    Also, I do think he doesn’t want to go down in history tied to their typhoid and rat-infested smoking pile of shit of a ship

    He’ll go down on his OWN crappy ship, thank you…

    I cannot imagine Bolton as a patriot or man of honor.  And he needs to live off the right wing gravy train in the future.

    So, I can’t see him really doing anything that would hurt Trump.

    What’s his angle?

  42. 42.

    Immanentize

    @Brachiator:. I am not saying it is true, but someone is going to know when shit really got real and spun out of control. Who better than a dialed in semi-spook like Bolton. Other than a real deal one like Haspel. Then, first one to the exit wins for all time. It’s like plea deals in a big drug or organized crime prosecution, first one to snitch gets the best deal. Third one to do so gets serious time.

    It will happen, but this probably isn’t that.

  44. 44.

    Kylroy

    @Roger Moore: It should be pointed out that Utah is *not* fond of Trump.  This is how I know Romney is completely gutless, in that he’s damn near the only person in the GOP who could take on Trump and *not* lose his seat.

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    @Brachiator:

    What’s his angle?

    It’s always possible that he thinks Trump is going down hard enough that he and his stooges will become unpeople.  If that happens, the unpeople won’t get wingnut welfare, but the people who properly distanced themselves from Trump may.  Anyone who took part in turning Trump into an unperson is likely to do especially well in the process.

    It’s also possible he believes he’s getting to the end of his career- he is 71 years old- and thus won’t be able to ride the wingnut gravy train much longer anyway.  In that case, maximizing his book revenue may be more important than maintaining his good standing with the wingnut welfare agencies.

  49. 49.

    JPL

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I posted this on the impeachment post also

    Sen Loeffler’s Cumberland office answered the phone.   I identified myself and gave my address and then asked if she was aware that John Bolton was a lifelong republican who worked for Reagan, both Bushes and Donald Trump.  I found it offensive that she would accuse him of slander without hearing his testimony.   The person was speechless on the other end.   If you live in GA call 770 661 0999.    

  50. 50.

    ByRookorbyCrook

    The thing is Bolton knows he was about be burned as a Republican FP influencer. It is what Trump does, he burns people down when they are no longer in his circle. So Bolton needs this book to continue to be somebody. If Trump is going to burn him, Bolton will burn Trump and the rest of the circle. We will see how this either escalates or how Bolton gets bought off. Look for a FOX News exclusive with Hannity to bolster his credibility while damning the Liberal NYT for trusting anonymous sources or they will continue to burn him and he will dribble more evidence.

  57. 57.

    jonas

    if you think about it, John, he knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders

    Yes, if there’s one thing that you can say about Trump, it’s that he keeps his opinions of people and issues closely held and doesn’t normally broadcast them around the world 50 times a day in incoherent rage tweets.

  58. 58.

    ...now I try to be amused

    @ByRookorbyCrook:

    The thing is Bolton knows he was about be burned as a Republican FP influencer. It is what Trump does, he burns people down when they are no longer in his circle. So Bolton needs this book to continue to be somebody. If Trump is going to burn him, Bolton will burn Trump and the rest of the circle. We will see how this either escalates or how Bolton gets bought off.

    If any of Trump’s people have read Sun Tzu they’d know you should leave your enemy a line of retreat unless you are prepared for him to fight like a cornered rat.

  59. 59.

    trollhattan

    @…now I try to be amused:

    If any of Trump’s people have read Sun Tzu they’d know you should leave your enemy a line of retreat unless you are prepared for him to fight like a cornered rat. 

    Allow me to stop you right there….

  60. 60.

    RAM

    Maybe that Anonymous person who wrote the tell-all book leaked the manuscript after it was sent to the White House?

  61. 61.

    RAM

    @rikyrah: It’s not just book sales. It’s general personal empowerment and enrichment. But you’re right–the rule of law and the Constitution simply don’t enter into their calculations.

  62. 62.

    EthylEster

    @Brachiator: That’s what I’m wondering, too. It’s hard for me to view anything about Bolton  as a positive. Did he think DJT would give him the war he wants? Did he not realize what an idiot and fraud DJT was/is? I am not yet convinced Bolton will (or even wants to) take down DJT.

  63. 63.

    JustRuss

    Bolton may have feared that the White House would withhold the book on national security grounds…

    Christ, everyone knows Trump has been using NDAs like crazy since forever, of course he’s going to jump on “national security” to quash anything he possibly can.

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