Home › Security › What the Bolton manuscript said about Ukraine aid
What the Bolton manuscript said about Ukraine aid
Summary
A look back at the reported manuscript that linked frozen US military assistance to investigations of Trump's political rivals.
What did a still-unpublished book manuscript add to the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal? On 27 January 2020, attention turned to the draft of The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton, a former National Security Advisor, which had been reported the previous day, 26 January 2020.
According to that reporting, the manuscript revealed that President Donald Trump told Bolton that unfreezing military aid to Ukraine depended on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
Why it mattered for Kyiv
The scandal had arisen from the discovery of Trump's attempts to press Ukraine to investigate Biden, his political rival, at a time when Biden was seeking the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump had blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package, in an effort to secure cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Contacts between the White House and Ukraine's government led to a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
The manuscript's account tied the aid freeze directly to the investigations, which gave the security dimension of the affair a clear shape: American military assistance to Ukraine was described as conditional on political demands.
The reported account came from a draft, not a published book, and it described a conversation between Trump and Bolton rather than a public act.
