Former National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz told Martha MacCallum on Thursday that what his former boss described as a “turning point” for his views about President Donald Trump’s capabilities to lead actually “disproves the whole book.”
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s upcoming book, “The Room Where It Happens,” is reportedly filled with criticisms of Trump’s decisions, leadership capability, and fitness for office. Although copies have been distributed to media outlets including the Daily Caller, the Justice Department has attempted to block the book from its scheduled June 23 publication by filing a lawsuit against the former national security advisor.
Fleitz said during “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that he had called for Bolton to “withdraw the book” in January because he doesn’t believe someone in that position “should be revealing internal candid discussions with the president.”
“The president has to be able to know that whatever he says in those discussions won’t be made public,” he said. “If he thinks they are going to be made public, a president won’t consult with experts and I think that is a dangerous prospect for national security.”
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“I want to talk about this in terms of what John Bolton called the turning point for him with Mr. Trump, which Bolton said was ‘the most irrational thing I ever saw a president do,'” said Fleitz, responding to MacCallum’s question about why Bolton wrote and released the book. “And this was when President Trump decided last June not to bomb Iran at the advice of John Bolton and other national security advisors.”
Recalling when Trump decided not to attack Iran after a U.S. drone was shot down because “we would have killed 100-200 people,” Fleitz called it a “principled decision.”
“This was not to win votes,” he said. “This wasn’t to promote the president domestically. It reflected the presidents’s principle not to get America into additional wars. And it was an act of leadership, because he bucked all of his national security advisors, Pompeo, the Secretary of Defense, so when we hear that the president does not have principles, he’s not qualified to lead, this incident that Bolton puts forward as the turning point for his relationship with President Trump in my mind it disproves the whole book.” (RELATED: Trump Responds To Bolton Book Allegations: ‘What A Dope!’)
Fleitz noted that while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others “found out how to work with the president and be effective,” Bolton and others “couldn’t figure this out.”
“The job of the senior advisors is to work with the president, not to fight with him and to implement his policies,” Fleitz concluded. “And I am very sorry that John Bolton couldn’t figure out how to do that.”