John Bolton Strikes Back at Mike Pompeo’s Claim He Should Be Jailed for Trump Tell-All: ‘Beyond Reckless’

Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton shrugged off Mike Pompeo’s attacks against him, including his declarations that Bolton should be in prison.

Bolton joined CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday to discuss various issues. The conversation turned to the upcoming memoir from Bolton’s ex-colleague, the former secretary of state. In his book, Pompeo voiced his disdain for several of his fellow top Trump administrative operatives and shared his anger with Bolton ever since the latter turned against Donald Trump.

From the book, as previewed by The Guardian:

Pompeo describes Trump calling John Bolton, his third national security adviser, a “scumbag loser”. After being fired, Bolton produced a memoir of his own, The Room Where It Happened. Trump sought to prevent publication but the book was a bestseller, relaying the president’s private conversations and what Pompeo considers highly sensitive material.

Bolton has now floated a White House run of his own, to try to block Trump. Pompeo fires salvoes Bolton’s way, at one point comparing him to Edward Snowden, who leaked surveillance secrets to the media in 2013, but saying the National Security Agency contractor “at least had the decency not to lie about his motive”.

Bolton, Pompeo writes, should “be in jail, for spilling classified information.” Pompeo also says he hopes one day to testify at Bolton’s trial on criminal charges.

Collins brought all of this up as she asked Bolton for his reaction to Pompeo’s giddiness to see him prosecuted. Bolton reacted by disputing Bolton’s claim of releasing classified info, and he counter-alleged with the Trump administration’s effort to suppress his book.

What he knows, in fact — or should know — is that my book went through a four-month-long pre-publication review process precisely to make sure there was no classified information in the book. It was arduous at times I can tell you. The National Security Council senior director responsible for that review cleared the book. And inside the White House, because Donald Trump didn’t want the book published before the election, he fired the senior director, a career employee of the National Archives, from her job and tried to get another review going.

As Bolton spoke about the Trump administration’s efforts to stop him from publishing his tell-all, he doubled down on his point that Pompeo “knows or should have known” that he cleared the review process for it.

“If he didn’t know about it,” Bolton added, “it’s incompetence in writing the book for not checking out the facts before he put it down on paper. And if he did know about it, that’s malicious and well beyond reckless to say things like that.”

Watch above via CNN.

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