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What did the Bolton manuscript say about Ukraine aid?
Summary
A look back at the reported contents of an unpublished book manuscript that surfaced in the final days of January 2020.
What did an unpublished manuscript reveal about the freezing of military aid to Ukraine? By 29 January 2020, the question was already circulating, because of a report dated 26 January 2020 about a book by John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor. The book, titled The Room Where It Happened, had not been published.
According to the report, the manuscript said President Donald Trump had told Bolton that unfreezing the military aid to Ukraine depended on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The wider scandal
The account bore directly on what became known as the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal. That affair arose from efforts to press Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rival Joe Biden, who was then seeking the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump had blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package. The aim, as later described, was to obtain cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in return.
Contacts between the White House and the Ukrainian government had culminated in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
The manuscript's reported contents were significant because they tied the aid directly to the investigations. For Kyiv, the matter concerned military assistance that Ukraine was due to receive.
