Fired former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who released an anti-Trump book earlier this year that sought to offer one last breath into the Democrats’ February impeachment hopes, debunked The Atlantic hit piece published Thursday. The magazine’s story relied entirely on anonymous sources to charge the president with making disparaging remarks on WWI veterans.
Thursday night, Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg offered new allegations on why the president didn’t visit the graves of fallen WWI soldiers on a 2018 trip to France, which the White House has continued to claim was due to inclement weather.
“When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote without a single source on record. “Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead.”
“Why should I go to that cemetery?” Trump reportedly said. “It’s filled with losers.”
The president also allegedly issued more derogatory comments related to long-time rival McCain, telling White House staff in 2018 following the Arizona senator’s death “we’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” three years after telling an auditorium audience on the campaign trail in 2015 that McCain was “not a war hero.”
Bolton’s book however, offered a different narrative of events falling in line with the official White House claims for the last-minute cancellation in France.
“The weather was bad, and Kelly and I spoke about whether to travel as planned to the Chateau-Thierry Belleau Wood monuments and nearby American Cemeteries, where many US World War I dead were buried,” Bolton wrote.
Marine One’s crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery. The ceiling was not too low for Marines to fly in combat, but flying POTUS was obviously something very different. If a motorcade was necessary, it could take between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes each way, along roads that were not exactly freeways, posing an unacceptable risk that we could not get the President out of France quickly enough in case of an emergency. It was a straightforward decision to cancel the visit but very hard for a Marine like Kelly to recommend, having originally been the one to suggest Belleau Wood… Trump agreed, and it was decided that others would drive to the cemetery instead.
The opening to the much-discussed Atlantic article, and the same events as described in John Bolton's memoir. https://t.co/1PQQXY8eoJ pic.twitter.com/JS32FJx9Ez
— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 4, 2020
The ousted Trump White House national security adviser also addressed The Atlantic’s anonymously sourced claims in an interview with Bloomberg, denying that he ever heard the any of the alleged remarks attributed to the president and said those quoted by the magazine ought to publicly go on record.
“I didn’t hear him say those things,” Bolton told Bloomberg, though he added, “it’s certainly possible.”
If Bolton however, who was a central figure on the president’s foreign trips overseas as the national security adviser before executing a personal vendetta following his turbulent White House exit, has called The Atlantic’s story false, perhaps it’s time the editor in chief re-evaluate its standards before publishing what could be entirely made up.
After all, The Atlantic did just that in July when one writer was discovered by Federalist Senior Editor Chris Bedford fabricating a St. Louis shooting to offer evidence in support of defunding the police. The left-wing paper, owned by a Joe Biden megadonor that still employs Jemele Hill and all of the woke people who ousted Kevin Williamson for the crime of being pro-life, refused to correct the record for days even after it got caught.
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1301924411176611841?s=20
The fact The Atlantic is owned by a Biden megadonor should have to be included in every article
— AmericaFest Poso (@JackPosobiec) September 4, 2020
