Free Republic

The US president no longer cares about the near-term political consequences of his actions, says the former senior official in an interview in Washington. Few people know the inside of U.S. Republican administrations as well as John Bolton, who has worked on foreign policy in every one of them since the days of Ronald Reagan. Under George W. Bush, he served as ambassador to the UN, and in Donald Trump’s first term, he served as National Security Adviser for 18 months—“a record for that administration,” he recalls with a laugh. The relationship didn’t end well: Bolton, like many other senior...

Vote Coming to Confirm Anti-gun Radical -- "Guns Kill Civil Society," says State Department Nominee Tuesday, June 23, 2009 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a Wednesday vote on a State Department nominee who supports gun control on a global scale. While advocates of the Second Amendment have come to expect that appointees of President Barack Obama would be hostile to the rights of gun owners, the president's nominee for legal advisor to the State Department reaches a whole new level of anti-gun extremism. Harold Hongju Koh, who served at the State Department under the Clinton administration, is a...

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia... Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war. But that is above ground. Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive...

JOHN KERRY OUTS CIA AGENT Remember all of the outrage and liberal indignation awhile ago when former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA agent? Evidently it was an unnamed Bush administration official that supplied the name....and the results of that investigation have yet to be made public. Well, it's happened again. Guess who publicly outed a CIA agent this time? Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. That's right...The Poodle's faux pas came yesterday as he was slamming U.N. Ambassador-nominee John Bolton at his confirmation hearings. Here's how it went down. For the majority of the hearings, Bolton...

Sen. John Kerry, who called for Karl Rove to be fired over allegations that he revealed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame, outed a genuine undercover CIA agent just this past April - even after the Agency asked that his identity be kept secret. Kerry blew the cover of CIA secret operative Fulton Armstrong during confirmation hearings for U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton. Questioning Bolton, Kerry asked: "Did Otto Reich share his belief that Fulton Armstrong should be removed for his position?" - according to a transcript excerpted by the New York Times. "The answer is yes," the top...

Dick Morris is spearheading a campaign to stop presumed Secretary of State John Kerry from tapping an “overt Castro sympathizer” to be in charge of U.S.-Cuban policy. Morris says one of Kerry’s closest confidants is Fulton Armstrong, who has served for years as his assistant for Cuban and Latin American relations on the Senate staff of the Foreign Policy Committee. … Morris said when John Bolton was up for Ambassador to Cuba, he said there was evidence Castro was amassing biological weapons for use against the U.S. and moved to declassify a report about it. “Fulton Armstrong opposed that and...

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Tuesday on CNN’s “New Central” that no world leader should “equate” the opinions of the American people with those of President Donald Trump. Bolton said, “I think Trump is ripping through decades of American effort to build up good faith, trust, reliance, counting on the United States in times of crisis. And the economic cost of the tariffs are going to be bad.” He added, “I think you saw a little bit of that in the meeting today. The leader who was backing down in that meeting was Trump. He’d already made all...

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Monday on MSNBC’s “Ana Cabrera Reports” that if President Donald Trump attempted to take control of Greenland with military force, it “would provoke an impeachment crisis almost immediately.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump downplayed the likelihood but did not completely rule it out. He said, “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there, you need that. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people which will take care of and will cherish them and all of that, but...

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Source” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should “resign for for his own safety’s sake.” Co-host Pamela Brown said, “I want to ask you, before we go about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, you know that there are now at least two instances of him using the commercial app Signal to discuss sensitive military info. Trump tells The Atlantic that he believes Hegseth will get it together. Do you believe Hegseth should still be on the job? Bolton said, “No. I think he should resign for for his own safety’s sake...

U.S. President Donald Trump's moves to take China to task on trade are likely to backfire as his sweeping global tariffs hit allies as well as rivals, according to former national security advisor John Bolton.

John Bolton says that a ceasefire isn't in Ukraine's best interest

Shortly after the diplomatic row, Bolton appeared on MSNBC, telling host Nicole Wallace he thinks Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz should resign from their roles in the Trump White House. Bolton—an extreme foreign policy hawk and ardent supporter of U.S. military intervention in a concerning number of other countries—dubiously argued that both men’s credibility could suffer if they remain associated with Trump.

Former national security adviser John Bolton said President Trump’s mind is “full of mush” as he navigates international affairs and ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Bolton joined CNN’s “The Source” Monday evening, just hours after the U.S. voted against a UN resolution that would have condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. “There are a lot of strange votes of the United Nations that I participated in,” he told host Kaitlan Collins. “It wasn’t so much the vote itself, as the fact we are aligned with what has always been NATO’s principal threat.” “We have sided now, in this vote, with...

Former national security adviser John Bolton called President Trump’s positioning on ending the war in Ukraine “pretty close to surrender” in an interview released Thursday. “I think Trump’s remarks and that of [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth and others come pretty close to surrender,” he told Politico. “It’s a position that’s similar to what [Vice President] JD Vance announced during the campaign about Ukraine: There’d be a ceasefire in place, a militarized zone would be created, negotiations would begin, Ukraine would agree not to join NATO.” Trump and Hegseth made waves last week with comments that broke starkly with U.S....

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Source” that President Donald Trump “has effectively surrendered” to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Host Kaitlan Collins said, “You’ve previously said that that you believe Putin sees Trump as what you described as an easy mark. You were there for their first meeting in Helsinki. What are your expectations for this one?” Bolton said, “Well, I don’t have any expectations anymore. I think we know exactly what’s gonna happen. President Trump has effectively surrendered to Putin before the negotiations have even begun. The positions that Defense Secretary Hegseth announced in...

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Source” that President Donald Trump “has effectively surrendered” to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Host Kaitlan Collins said, “You’ve previously said that that you believe Putin sees Trump as what you described as an easy mark. You were there for their first meeting in Helsinki. What are your expectations for this one?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to announce he will cancel former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s security detail and clearance — and direct the Pentagon’s acting investigator general to launch an investigation into whether the retired soldier should be demoted in rank, Fox News reported Tuesday. Despite retiring from the Army in September 2023, the Secret Service has continued to protect Milley due to Iranian threats of retaliation on him for his role in the drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020 that killed Tehran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump last week removed the protective...

he received from USAID: a USAID Hand Grenade with his name engraved on it.

President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said during an interview that some of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts could hurt “long-term American interests,” particularly on the foreign policy front. “A well-run foreign aid program, and I’m not saying that’s what exists now, but a well-run foreign aid program is trying to help our friends, persuade others to become friends. How you spend it in the country is open to debate. But nobody talks about, are we spending enough in the right countries to advance American interests? That’s what you need,” Bolton said during a Friday...

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has become the latest ex-official from President Trump’s first term to lose their security detail, according to a report. The Pentagon revoked Esper’s taxpayer-funded security detail on Tuesday night, CBS News reported on Wednesday. Esper’s security detail had been provided by the Department of Defense as a result of threats he’s received from Iran since the 2020 US airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. Esper, 60, served as Trump’s secretary of the Army from November 2017 to July 2019, before he...