Former national security adviser John Bolton lamented the “very disturbing” behavior of former President Donald Trump during his time in office, saying there was no excuse for his behavior.
Bolton spent two years in the Trump administration and recounted to MSNBC’s Jen Psaki what he described as a pattern of behavior in which Trump enjoyed keeping anything he could get his hands on.
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“He was kind of a collector of things that he thought were of interest to him for some reason or another, clippings, mementos, classified documents,” he told Psaki, a former White House press secretary under Joe Biden. “It was very disturbing.”
“I think he was kind of a collector of things… It was very disturbing. It was a pattern that was evident to me from my earliest days.” @AmbJohnBolton on Trump’s retention of classified documents. pic.twitter.com/CgGRw4ob6N
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) June 18, 2023
Bolton recalled that he could see during meetings that Trump liked to keep things and that “it became a practice just to make sure that we got them back in as many cases as we could. Obviously, we failed in many cases.”
Trump has been indicted on 37 counts by the Justice Department for charges related to alleged obstruction and mishandling of classified documents.
Keeping things was a pattern for Trump, Bolton continued, saying because of his familiarity with the former president’s behavior, he doesn’t “need to read the indictment or believe its allegations are true — although I’m pretty confident they are.”
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He then shared the story of Trump tweeting a picture of a failed Iranian missile launch which was shown during an intelligence briefing.
“There’s utterly no excuse for that,” he said. “There’s no conceivable reason for that, except it made him feel good to be able to do it. That’s one example, but it’s typical of the mindset in my view.”
