John Bolton served as U.S. National Security Advisor during Donald Trump’s first term. John Kiriakou describes him as one of the most dangerous men in America.[1]
How he got the job
Kiriakou’s explanation for the appointment is not ideological affinity but a hiring vacuum. Almost a year into the administration there were thirteen vacant assistant secretary of state positions, and a foreign policy cannot be run without assistant secretaries to run it. With no one else willing to take the jobs, the only available pools were previous administrations and the more conservative think tanks — which is to say the neoconservatives.[2] Kiriakou rates Elliott Abrams, who came in alongside Bolton as the National Security Council’s senior director for Latin America, as at least as offensive and horrible a human being.[3][4]
A habit of contradicting the president
Kiriakou notes Bolton contradicted Trump “all the time,” citing a Washington Post report that Bolton had joked that if he had his way, the United States would currently be involved in four different wars.[5] He gives a concrete example: Trump publicly offered to meet with Iranian officials with no preconditions, a statement with no precedent from any U.S. president — only for Bolton to contradict him two hours later, saying there were, in fact, preconditions.[6] He publicly predicted Bolton’s 2019 departure on nothing more than informal chatter with friends inside the White House and his own analysis, reasoning that Trump places an unusually high premium on loyalty — a loyalty that, for Trump, means never being seen publicly contradicting him.[7]
The signature on the finding
In Kiriakou’s account of how a covert action is authorized, the National Security Advisor is one of the required signatures. The CIA’s proposal goes to the Office of Legal Counsel, which twists and warps U.S. law to make the program look lawful and writes it up at a classification level that keeps Congress out of it; the memorandum then goes to the National Security Council — meaning, in 2019, to Bolton. The message is in effect “Dear Mr. Bolton, the CIA wants to overthrow the Venezuelan government, we think it’s legal for these reasons, what do you think?”, and the answer is that Justice thinks it is legal so it must be legal. Bolton signs, the president eventually signs, and the finding returns to the CIA to sit in a vault in the operations center with a copy in the director’s office.[8][9]
Kiriakou drew the parallel to the torture program, which he watched being approved in the same manner, and said in April 2019 that the same process was under way for Venezuela — with Bolton not only accepting that it sounded legal but that it sounded like a great idea and ought to be U.S. policy. He guaranteed that identical conversations had been held about Iran and half a dozen other countries.[10]
Venezuela
The pressure campaign against Venezuela, in Kiriakou’s reading, did not come from the president’s own judgement — Trump, he says, could not locate Venezuela on a map — but from Bolton and Abrams, who between them hated Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro.[1][4]
Bolton’s grasp of the country was thin enough to be exposed in public. He had asserted that Juan Guaidó had every right to be president under the Venezuelan constitution; a reporter put to him that the constitution allows thirty days from election to take the oath and begin governing, that Guaidó had not been elected at all, and that far more than thirty days had passed since the coup, so he was no longer constitutionally eligible. Bolton simply stood and stared at him. Kiriakou reads the silence as evidence that nobody involved had bothered to read the document, and that Bolton did not even recognize it as a gotcha question: “You’re going to lead a coup in a country and you don’t even know what the law is.”[11][12]