Former national security adviser John Bolton admitted that he may have made a mistake by failing to directly confront President Trump with what he considered inappropriate or illegal conduct, saying the White House isn’t “The West Wing” television show and matters aren’t easily resolved.
“I’m certainly aware I made mistakes. I tried to discuss some of them in the book. It was hardly perfect. There were probably things I could have done better,” Bolton told Robert Costa in a Washington Post Live interview Tuesday.
“I’m not sure on this score it would have shifted the president’s view on all this in part because he was hearing from so many people from the outside who didn’t understand how the government was actually brought that were influencing,” Bolton explained.
Bolton, whose book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was released Tuesday, said Trump is “very good at rejecting criticism.”
But he said he briefed Attorney General William Barr and the White House counsel on any behavior he considered troubling from Trump.
“The service in the White House itself is not like ‘The West Wing.’ There are dramatic confrontations with the president” that aren’t tied up in 24 hours, he said, referring to the NBC show that starred Martin Sheen as President Josiah Bartlett.
Bolton said during his stint in the White House and even now that his book is being released that he said he got criticism that “I tried to do too many people’s jobs for them and that I should have just done my job.”
“So I tried to respect the fact I’m not an investigator. I had plenty of other things to do. I did refer this to lawyers. I told others on the [National Security Council] staff to talk to the lawyers. I told the other White House advisors … but I tried to focus on my job,” he said.
In the book, Bolton accuses Trump of trying to get Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy more products from American farmers because it would help his re-election efforts.
He also said he notified Barr and the White House counsel about instances when Trump expressed a willingness to thwart probes into the Chinese telecom ZTE and Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank.
Bolton also blasted Democrats for “impeachment malpractice” by narrowing their investigation into Ukraine.