John Bolton is a former Bush administration official who’s been a key advisor to Donald Trump and is reportedly being rumored for a top role at the State Department. Despite saying he was against the Iraq War, Trump has curiously latched onto Bolton, a neocon war hawk who has been wrong about so, so many things:
Bolton has long been one of the most hawkish of all the neoconservative hawks. He was part of the Bush-Cheney crew that claimed Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction and that war was the only option. As a top State Department official prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Bolton pushed the false claims that Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes and uranium for its supposed nuclear weapons program. He was also a supporter of a conspiracy theorist named Laurie Mylroie who contended that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. Before Bush launched the Iraq War, Bolton predicted that "the American role actually will be fairly minimal." (In 1997, he was one of several conservatives who wrote to President Bill Clinton and urged him to attack Saddam.)
Even with all of the information we have now (which we had then), as of May 2016 John Bolton still said invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
Yesterday he appeared on Fox News to address the allegations of Russian election hacking (and possible collusion with the Trump campaign) and he floated something that sounds like a FW: FW: FW: FW: FW email from your crazy uncle, that the whole outrageous affair could be a "false flag" by the Obama administration:
It is not at all clear to me, just viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the [Democratic National Committee] and the [Republican National Committee] was not a false flag operation,” he told Fox News’s Eric Shawn on Sunday.
When pressed about his use of the phrase “false flag” and whether he was accusing an entity in the U.S. of involvement, Bolton said, “We just don’t know.”
“But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.”
The Obama administration that was so concerned it didn’t publicize the report from 17 different intelligence agencies concluding Russia was interfering in the election and actively working to elect Donald Trump, because they didn’t want the appearance of being political? We won’t link to any of the conspiracy websites Republicans apparently rely on for news these days, but this is insane. The man in the interview below, the same one who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last year saying the United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, needs to be kept as far away from the State Department and U.S. foreign policy as humanly possible.