Former United States National Security Advisor John Bolton offered a different take on The Atlantic’s report detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged remarks about America’s war dead.
Bolton appeared on Fox News where host Martha McCallum asked his opinion of the unfavorable report as she recalled Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin’s validation of some aspects of the story.
“Jennifer Griffin stands by her story,” MacCallum said during Monday’s interview, adding, “But I guess the bigger question is, this question of the president’s general attitude towards the military and what people see is very different from what they’re hearing from these generals.”
Although Bolton recently released the scathing, tell-all memoir, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” he claims the series of events detailed in The Atlantic’s report do not align with what he witnessed during the president’s 2018 trip to France. Among the claims in the report, The Atlantic reports that Trump allegedly said Aisne-Marne American Cemetery is “filled with losers.”
By Bolton’s own account, some of those claims in the report, regarding the trip, are “simply false.”
“According to what that article said, the president made disparaging remarks about soldiers and people buried in the cemetery in connection with the decision for him not to go to the ceremony that was planned that afternoon, and that was simply false,” Bolton said.
He added, “I don’t know who told the author that, but that was false.”
See Bolton’s remarks below:
However, Bolton admitted that he cannot prove the president did not make the remarks as he noted he is well aware of Trump’s “habit” for “disparaging people.”
“Obviously, I can’t prove the negatives that he never said those things. The president has a habit of disparaging people,” Bolton said. “He ends up denigrating almost everybody that he comes in contact with whose last name is not Trump.”
He also said, “I was simply responding to what I thought the main point of the Atlantic article, that at the critical point Saturday morning when the decision was made not to go to Aisne-Marne that he made the disparaging remarks, and he did not.”
