Former national security advisor John Bolton says President Donald Trump is “not fit for office” in a preview for his primetime interview airing Sunday.
Speaking to ABC News’ Martha Raddatz for a one-hour primetime special that will air on Sunday at 9 p.m. ET — two days before the release of “The Room Where It Happened,” his new tell-all book about his time in Trump’s White House — Bolton also said he doesn’t believe Trump doesn’t possess “the competence to carry out the job” of the presidency.
“There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection,” he said of the president’s overall governing strategy, adding that anything other than reelection was a concern that “fell by the wayside.”
The Trump administration sued Bolton on Tuesday, arguing that Bolton breached his contractual and fiduciary obligations by revealing classified information in his upcoming book.
“The Room Where It Happened” is scheduled to be published on June 23 from Simon & Schuster. In a promotional summary released last week, Simon & Schuster marketed it as “the book Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read,” adding that Bolton “argues the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy.”
The Trump administration’s lawsuit is seeking an injunction to prevent Bolton from publicly disclosing the classified information in the book, saying he did not get “written permission from the United States” through a prepublication review process. The suit also requests that Bolton be ordered to notify Simon & Schuster that he was not authorized to disclose the information in the book, that the publisher “further delay” the release of the book and to take “any and all available steps to retrieve and dispose” of any copies of the book that are in the hands of third-parties.
Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, dismissed the threat.
“Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility,” the publisher said. “Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.”