(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton appeared on CNN both to tout his own intelligence and warn members of the House J6 Committee that their own grandstanding was in danger of undermining its case against President Trump.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, admits to helping plan coups in other countries while debating CNN’s @jaketapper about Trump’s capability to plan a coup on January 6. https://t.co/V9NnWQHH7h
— CNN (@CNN) July 12, 2022
The arch-neocon, an Iraq War salesman who spent decades advocating for regime change in at least seven countries, was particularly dismissive of the notion that Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election amounted to an attempted coup d ‘etat.
Rep. Liz Cheney, RINO-Wyo., for example, has claimed Trump “oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the 2020 election,” and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., described Trump’s actions as “essentially a political coup.”
But Bolton rejected outright the idea that Trump had the intelligence to pull off such maneuvers.
“It’s . . . a mistake, as some people have said . . . that somehow this was a carefully planned coup d’état,” Bolton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “That’s not the way that Donald Trump does things.”
Bolton went on to complain that the Trump-as-mastermind narrative denigrates the intelligence of deep-state apparatchiks like himself.
“As someone who helped plan coups d’etat . . . in other places, it takes a lot of work,” Bolton said.
President Bush’s famously combative ambassador to the United Nations then reminded Tapper’s audience that the real scandal of Jan. 6 was the federal government’s total lack of preparation for riots they knew were on the way.
Bolton pointed to claims made by Dr. Donell Harvin, former Chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence for Washington D.C., who was monitoring right-wing Twitter in advance of Jan. 6.
Harvin, who has said that his team saw all sorts of social media activity “that would lend itself to essentially an attack,” told MSNBC that the chaos on January 6th “wasn’t a failure of the intelligence, it was a failure to heed the intelligence.”
In response, Bolton wondered why Democrats on Capitol Hill deliberately refused extra security.
“Where was the rest of the government,” he asked. “If this was so evident at the time, why there wasn’t more security on the hill when the demonstrators turned up.”
