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What did the Bolton manuscript say about Ukraine?
Summary
A look back at the reported contents of an unpublished book manuscript that bore on the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal.
What did an unpublished manuscript reveal about the freezing of military aid to Ukraine? On 1 February 2020, that question was still being discussed, days after the account first emerged on 26 January 2020.
According to the manuscript of former National Security Advisor John Bolton's book, The Room Where It Happened, President Donald Trump told him that unfreezing military aid to Ukraine was conditional on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The wider scandal
The manuscript bore directly on what became known as the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal. That affair concerned attempts to press Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rival Biden, which could have damaged Biden's campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.
The aid at the centre of it was a congressionally mandated military package of $400 million. Trump blocked payment of it, in an effort to obtain 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 therefore tied the withheld aid explicitly to the investigations, and it came from a former National Security Advisor.
