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What the Bolton manuscript said about Ukraine aid
Summary
A retrospective on the reports of 26 January 2020 that an unpublished book manuscript linked frozen US military aid to Ukraine with investigations of political rivals.
What did John Bolton's unpublished manuscript say about military aid to Ukraine? On 27 January 2020, that question was at the centre of the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal, a day after reports on the manuscript's contents emerged.
As reported on 26 January 2020, the manuscript of the former National Security Advisor's book, The Room Where It Happened, said that President Donald Trump told him that unfreezing military aid to Ukraine depended on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The wider scandal
The affair arose from the discovery of Trump's attempts to press Ukraine into investigating Biden, his political rival, at a time when Biden was seeking the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump also enlisted surrogates, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr, to pressure Ukraine and other governments.
Trump blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package, in an attempt to obtain quid pro quo cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Contacts between the White House and the Ukrainian government culminated in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
The manuscript's account, as reported, tied the aid directly to the investigations, which made it significant for the scandal's central question of why the money had been withheld.
