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GEOPOLITICS JOHN BOLTON CONVERSATION POLITICO \| John Bolton: Who will be Trump’s fall guy for Signalgate? PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Y-6Dt5wOQ Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess
Who will be Trump’s fall guy for Signalgate? \| John Bolton POLITICO Mar 28, 2025 168K subscribers ... 151,612 views ... 4.2K likes PLAYBOOK Deep Dive In this episode of Deep Dive, POLITICO's Rachael Bade sat down with President Donald Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton. Subscribe to our channel! / @politico Check out our video catalog: https://www.politico.com/video Follow POLITICO here: ➤ X: https://x.com/politico/ ➤ Instagram: / politico ➤ Facebook: / politico Explore the podcast Transcript 0:00 i would say remember what that iconic uh French statesman the marquee the Talan was once said to have said it's worse than a crime it's a mistake and that's what this whole thing was a mistake Washington remains a Twitter right now with everybody asking who if anyone is going to get sacked over signalgate but smart political know that the real battle here is about who is going to define President Trump's foreign policy will it be the old school hawks or the more skeptical isolationists it's a big question that plays into many of Donald Trump's ambitions one person who knows a lot about Trump's thinking on these issues is his former national security adviser John Bolton trump views international relations through the prism of his personal relations with foreign leaders bolton as you know is a household name but it bears repeating that he's had senior roles for every Republican president since Reagan and he had that notorious falling out with Donald Trump because he's not afraid to speak his mind i caught up with Bolton over video on Thursday and we talked about everything from Signalgate to how Trump fires people the deep fissures in the Republican party over foreign policy JD Vance's apathy toward Europe and what 1:00 it's like to be the subject of Trump's personal vendetta i'm Rachel Bade and this is Playbook Deep Dive thank you Ambassador for joining us appreciate it welcome to Deep Dive so within hours of being sworn in President Trump revoked your Secret Service protection despite the Iranians having a price on your head just to sort of start what is it like to know five years after your sort of falling out with him that he's still thinking about you on his first day back in the White House well I'm glad to be on his mind i guess that's the only thing I can say u you know uh it was uh uh obviously had an effect on me and then the others whose security uh protection he canled but the bigger effect is on the US itself when foreign adversaries think that uh senior American officials former or present can be exposed if they fall out with Donald Trump uh that tells them something about our vulnerability and it tells his current uh senior adviserss something about their vulnerability too this is 2:00 not the the way to run a railroad do you fear for your life now without that security have you had to go buy or pay for um private security well I'm I'm making arrangements with the specifics of which I won't get into but sure look the the this is not you know chatter on the internet uh this threat not just to myself but including Trump and Pompeo Esper Millie and others uh is a conclusion of uh years of watching the Iranians and pretty silent information about the nature of the threat so I don't think the Iranians give up easily uh they were after Trump just before the election as charges were filed against a Pakistani trying to hire hitman against Trump himself in in the in the period before the election which is pretty pretty brazen so it's it continues to be current no doubt about it let's talk about signalgate I want to get your reaction to all of this obviously so when you were national security adviser how often did you put highly sensitive war plans excuse me attack 3:00 plans as they're calling them into a signal with a reporter well I didn't use signal then and uh you know I I took a pretty simplistic approach to to things um I was being sarcastic just by the way and and uh you know I would say that uh there are two kinds of communication uh when you're in one of these senior administration positions there's communications over the government secure telecommunications network on which we have spent billions of dollars and decades of effort to make impenetrable by our adversaries so there's that option and then there is every other option and every other option is not acceptable you you don't know how any given conversation is going to go if I want to speak to the Secretary of Defense I can have something purely uh non-classified to talk about but the conversation can shift very quickly to something else if you're on a secure line it doesn't matter if you're in an nonsecure uh uh communication platform then you're 4:01 at risk well I was going to ask how does like a welloiled national security apparatus sort of conduct business on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning or weekend basically when you're not in the office like the excuse they sort of given is that oh everybody was sort of everywhere we weren't in the office it sounds like that's not an excuse look if you want a group chat there's a place for it it's called the situation room and if it's Saturday or Sunday that's too damn bad isn't it the the United States is about to engage in using military force you got something else more important in mind number one number two with a few exceptions on that list like Steve Witov whose presence is inexplicable to me but for the Secretary of State Secretary of Defense Director of National Intelligence Director of the CIA National Security Adviser they are never more than an arms length away from secure telecommunications i had that kind of capability built into my house i had a skiff built in my basement by the National Security uh Council staff uh in 5:00 all these people are receiving protection of one kind or another they have secure phones in the vehicles they travel in they have secure communications on their desks uh it's just inconceivable let's talk about the fallout um you know better than anyone there's sort of two things President Trump hates the most number one he hates an embarrassing headline right anything that makes him look bad doesn't like it he also hates giving longtime critics a win so far we have sort of seen that his concern uh about the latter basically Democrats the media whatever getting a win by you know asking someone that that has protected Michael Waltz but at what point do you think the former embarrassment to him becomes the thing that's most important well and it's the former that's most important if he thinks he's suffering political damage as a result of this uh then I think the risk to everybody involved uh goes up both holding on to their jobs uh and also the risk of uh of real investigation i think as long as Donald 6:00 Trump doesn't feel the heat nobody will be investigated for anything and they won't lose their jobs at least in the short term uh but the second metric at work is what has all this done to Trump's view of the people themselves how much of this does he take before uh he says it's not worth the risk down the road now that that ain't going to happen this week or next week or the week after but we had Hegathth earlier uh in in the uh incident with Elon Musk somebody maybe inviting Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing on the China war plan remember that war plan i do yeah trump Trump specifically said later he didn't think that anybody should receive a briefing on the China war plan that's the correct position and he said almost gratuitously you know Elon has a lot of business in China that could be a conflict of interest well indeed it could be a conflict of interest and that was another signal he didn't like that at all so I think Hegsath already had one strike against him uh uh the the the 7:03 uh signal uh uh chat issue maybe two strikes against him but at some point uh I do think people become vulnerable uh but it would be as you say no action will be taken until a couple months from now at the earliest when suddenly they'll find some very attractive way to spend more time with their family it's interesting that you brought up Pete Hegsith because some people have been surprised that all the focus has been on Michael Waltz i mean we talked to people in the White House the anger is not at Hegsath i can tell you that for certain from my own conversations it's all focused on Michael Waltz and yet it was Pete Hgsth who put you know this at least sensitive information about strikes and timetables into the chat i mean what can we sort of take away or read from the fact that people close with Donald Trump are not talking about heath and in fact I think the president said yesterday Pete did nothing wrong uh this was all Mike what do you make of that well I think it says 8:01 Waltz is more vulnerable and I don't think that's entirely fair everybody on that signal group chat had a responsibility to protect government secrets and you know the daddy on that chat the highest ranking official was the vice president it's another stunning thing to me is that at some point when he seth began reporting what was happening or what was about to happen that somebody didn't say let's take this out of this channel and put it on the high side the classified side nobody said that everybody is responsible for that chat continuing heg Waltz may have started it but everybody else allowed it to go on uh Hegth has said in his defense that I had a duty to keep these people informed no he didn't that's the secretary of the treasury Scott Besson doesn't need to know when the second F-18 strike group is about to take off you know the only other person I think other than Hegv himself who should have been kept up to date moment to moment 9:01 was Waltz because he might have to tell the president or he might have to notify somebody else when you're engaged in a military operation like that let the operators operate what does Susie Wilds have to know how things are going she'll she'll know is she going to say 'Well I don't like how it's going so far why don't we do this instead of that?' So Hegsth's own justification for sending this information out uh is not becoming what a defense secretary should be saying i want to come back to uh Hegathth versus Waltz the second but just very quickly your read on this is that this would have been classified information correct even though they're saying it's not it's clearly classified information and uh including saying that the terrorist target had been seen walking into this particular building with his girlfriend and now the the building was flat well how do you think we get that information is it in the newspapers you know they broadcasting it on uh Houthi TV obviously it comes from sources and methods and and just just to put that out in a non-classified channel 10:00 is is incomprehensible to me is it true though that the Secretary of Defense can sort of declassify things on a whim like do they have any sort of uh leg to stand on on that like if he decides this is not classified therefore it is not yeah well you know if uh in terms of a defense against a criminal prosecution if it's not classified that that may have something to do with it but remember the fascination with with did they violate the law as opposed to uh did they just do something that that no reasonable person should shouldn't have done distracts from the real issue which is potentially putting American service members in jeopardy so I I would say remember what that iconic uh French statesman the marquee toaland was once said to have said it's worse than a crime it's a mistake and that's what this whole thing was a mistake so to go back to this notion of you know who's the the more vulnerable fall guy here he or Waltz how much of this is sort of 11:00 this ongoing civil war happening in the Republican party right now or I mean this sort of break we're even seeing with some in the administration You have some who are more sort of reanite more hawkish types like Michael Waltz like Rubio and then you have I guess you know sort of a restrainer branch right the MAGA America first sort of faction of the GOP do you think that that faction is putting the blame on Waltz to try to push him out well I I've read some of of your reporting on it i really think it's uh pretty much a one-sided war by the pro-Russia faction within the MAGA movement against what you might call the Reaganite more traditional uh foreign policy wing and they're just obsessed with uh finding remnants of prior Republican administrations and and and purging them i think the the more Reaganite people are just trying to do their job but it shows fundamentally that uh if if that is a description that how non-serious these uh these isolationist neoisolationists are and 12:01 how they don't understand really uh how much is at stake here i think the bigger question is the responsibility everybody on that group chat had uh and rather than pointing fingers at particular individuals why didn't at some point somebody say we've got to get off signal and get on to classified channel i don't I just can't understand even if you got into it inadvertently let alone the fact there's somebody on this chain that nobody knows who he is nobody asks about it nobody checked it um uh it's just it's it it is something that our adversaries will take advantage of they see this and they say to themselves 'This can't be the first time they did this.' Uh now now maybe it'll be enough to stop it happening in the future but we don't know how much damage may already have been done you know just because a foreign government gets intelligence doesn't mean they act on it it may mean they piece it together with other things they want to see if information they're getting from that source will produce more information in the future you don't reveal you know 13:00 something and risk blowing the source so understanding what harm may have come to the United States as a result of these signal chats first this one on Yemen but perhaps others i mean that is a very serious question I haven't heard anybody ask about so do you have confidence that Michael Waltz um is sort of going to be somebody who pushes back on this sort of America first isolationist swing at the party that you think is sort of taking over right now and if so do you want him not to resign i guess I was going to ask do you think he should resign but given that I'm hearing from you know we hear from Speaker Johnson a lot of more traditional Republicans that they don't want him to go uh I'm curious what you think like do you think he should stay well you know if I said I thought he should stay that might hurt him so you know you know the old saying in politics I'll be for you or against you whichever does you more good i I just think at this point uh the the only issue for Donald Trump is whether he's being hurt and I don't see that he's suffering harm 14:01 at the moment it it could be polls will show that there is harm um but but that doesn't mean that in his mind many of the actors in this particular drama have really used up a lot of their political capital and are on very thin ice with him down the road so you've obviously had a falling out with President Trump um didn't leave the White House on good terms yourself what are the early signs that someone like Michael Waltz should be looking for whether it's subtle or otherwise that might determine that he is uh in the offing well when the president said as he did last night uh well I understand Mike took responsibility for this you got a question ask Mike this is not a good sign and and uh it's not even a good sign for Hegsth he's defending them now because because they're under attack by Democrats in the press but but that's not to say that that uh in his own mind he hasn't separated himself from them because he doesn't know what the full 15:00 consequences are going to be and he's protecting himself but but one thing that uh that's typical of Trump is he starts asking people his friends and associates outside the government hey what what do you think of this guy and once he starts asking this is not a good management technique i'm not recommending this to anybody but it's what Trump does and if somebody gets feedback that Trump's asking you know the membership of Mara Lago or other well-placed uh individuals what they think of him that that's not good speaking of uh President Trump as a manager I mean can you just talk for a few minutes about what it's like for him to fire someone i mean this is a guy who became famous from The Apprentice you're fired right but that's not really how he operates right no I I'm not sure he's he I I don't know all the people he's fired but I'm not sure he's ever fired anybody in person i mean uh John Kelly told Rex Tillerson he was no longer Secretary of State via long-distance phone call i don't know whether it was classified or not but uh but Tillerson was in Egypt when he was told Rance Priebus found out 16:00 he was no longer chief of staff after he got off Air Force One and there was no car to take him back to the White House uh Trump doesn't like the confrontation you know he finds somebody else to to uh to give the person the word that they're no long their services are no longer required so I want to pull back a little bit on uh a v various foreign policy and national security topics uh but just to sort of segue us here I mean if we didn't already know it from Vice President JD Vance's speak uh speech at the at the Munich Security Conference a couple weeks ago we certainly learned it from the signal chain he has a lot of disdain for Europe um and that he basically views him as a bunch of freeloaders he made it clear he thought that intervening with the Houthis was bailing Europe out can you speak at all to what's sort of behind this animus that he has behind Europe obviously you disagree with it right um and I guess I'm wondering do you think he has um the sort of persuasive ability to sort of bring President Trump to to that sort of point 17:00 of view because the president is not necessarily in the same place well I can't I can't explain uh what what is um what is motivating Vance but I I do think that it reflects a very primitive view of international relations and uh really not that dissimilar from Trump where everything is a matter of dollars and cents there's there's no appreciation for what a collective security uh collective defense organization like NATO is and what it gives the United States how it benefits the United States i think in part we're suffering from 35 years post end of the cold war where uh we've had inadequate expression of why America has strategic interests all around the world and why we need to protect and why a forward American policy benefits us we've heard too much frankly uh from uh from liberals about how we're just we're doing this for the sake of democracy around the world and in fact that's not correct we're we're doing this in in substantial part because it's in our 18:01 interest to do it that whatever minimal amount of order there is in the world uh benefits us it's true that uh many of our allies don't bear their fair share of the burden but we're not doing this for them we're doing it for us and if we don't do it for us nobody else is going to do it for us take the Yemen situation where the Hoodis have blocked uh the critical Suez Canal Red Sea Maritime Passage and while it's true that most of the trade that goes through that is between Europe and some other part of the world it has been a bedrock principle of American foreign policy since before we were a nation uh that we believed in freedom of the seas and little secret for those who don't know it the seas extend everywhere you know they're all connected ultimately and when we see a violation of freedom of the seas uh we have throughout our history acted to end it uh no matter uh how big uh other people's interests in it were so a little history for JD Vance thomas Jefferson in his first term 19:00 fought the Barbarie pirates on the coast of North Africa is where the um line in the marine hymn comes from from the halls of Monizuma to the shores of Tripoli that's Thomas Jefferson in 1801 to 1805 because the Europeans paid tribute to the Barbar pirates extortion money we would call it today uh and Jefferson said uh we're not going to pay tribute and uh and so Steven Decar became a great American hero by his actions there uh that's on the shores of North Africa that's not very far away from the Red Sea and Jefferson did that at the beginning of the 19th century for freedom of the seas for America the first American naval squadron in the Pacific was in the 1820s we didn't even have states on the Pacific Ocean we have been an international maritime power uh from the beginning the the first ship from America that went to China called the Empress of China was commissioned in 20:00 1783 the year of the Treaty of Versailles granting our independence so I would say to the vice president if you want a little lesson in freedom of the seas and American policy it's all out there just open a book but just to bring it back to his sort of um disdain for Europe I mean you I think I I I have seen that you have talked about how the happiest you ever saw President Trump was at when he was at some sort of um state dinner right with uh was it Charles oh Queen Elizabeth okay yeah so talk about that like he's not in the same place right like he talks about he talks about NATO yes in terms of other countries needing to put more money into NATO but he doesn't he's not out there saying 'Oh you know we're going to blow the whole thing up.' At least not at this point do do you think that he's going to end up in the same place that JD Vance says well I don't I don't think Trump thinks in in conceptual terms so uh there there are parts of Europe he likes and parts of Europe he doesn't like kier Starmer made a very uh astute move in his first visit by bringing an 21:01 invitation from King Charles for another state visit as you said Trump I've never seen Trump happier than in his white tie at the dinner with Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace and I have to say it was quite an occasion but uh another another white tie dinner with King Charles this time fantastic other monarchies in Europe should do the same he was thrilled to be invited to the uh reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral by President Mcron before even before Trump was inaugurated he's a builder so he knows about you know cathedrals and things like that there there are ways to get to Trump the Europeans need to think about that I I don't think it occurs to Vance that that might be a problem for him we've got to talk about Ukraine uh and Russia here i mean Trump's art of the deal clearly is to sort of entice Putin to the table with a carrot and try to force Silinski to the table with a bat is there a charitable explanation for why Trump uh is showing so much sort of difference to Russia and sort of treating Ukraine so harshly trump views international relations through the 22:01 prism of his personal relations with foreign leaders so he thinks if he has good relations with Putin and the US has good relations with Russia that's not true but that's what he thinks he thinks he and Putin are friends by contrast he has not had a good relationship with Zilinski since the famous perfect phone call of 2019 that led to his first impeachment so therefore he thinks that uh if if he gives his friends some advantages like all the concessions he's already made on Ukraine that will help bring the peace he wants this war behind him he thinks it's Biden's war he said during the campaign it never would have happened putin doesn't think they're friends he thinks Trump is an easy mark and he's he thinks he's manipulable and he has been manipulating him as when Putin said several weeks ago you know Trump was right that if he had been president there wouldn't have been a war in Ukraine well maybe so maybe not but Trump loved to hear that then they released the hostage Mark Foley then Lucenko and Bellarus released another American hostage this is the 23:00 manipulation at work now I I think Putin's got to be very careful that he doesn't overstep it here and risk losing some of the concessions that Trump has made and Trump made a statement last night that uh that indicated maybe he was he thought Putin was slow rolling things it's not inevitable that uh Putin's going to get everything that he he wants he could make a mistake but the odds are in his favor now and I think he does want to slow roll things because he believes momentum on the battlefield is flowing in his direction what do you make of President Trump's uh posture toward China i mean on the one hand he's talked for a long time I got to be tough on China we're going to be tough on China tougher than Biden etc et etc but then he delayed the Tik Tok law uh enforcing that ban without divestment i know there were a number of Republicans on the Hill who were um super pissed that he took out or the administration took out this sort of provision in a spending bill in December that would have sort of stopped or or um cold investment American investment in China what do you make of his position right 24:00 now or can you even really define it well I think he blames China for his loss of the 2020 election because of CO of course he didn't lose the election it was stolen but if it hadn't been stolen China might have cost it but but beyond that going back to his first term he wants at some point to negotiate the biggest trade deal in human history with China so if you look at a very tumultuous opening two months uh while tariff measures have been traded back and forth by China and the United States it's been relatively quiet compared to a lot of other fronts and I think Xiinping is waiting to see a little bit better what Trump is going to do and I think Trump uh hoping for this opportunity to do the biggest trade deal in history uh has not been willing to turn the heat on yet i think it's a huge mistake i don't care whether they sell Tik Tok or not it ought to be banned in this country uh it's an arm of Chinese intelligence doesn't matter what's on the platform it's a vacuum cleaner uh of American habits and and actions that that entirely benefit China do you think 25:01 though that they have the upper hand they being China Tik Tok because the president is not going to want to get rid of it go through with it yeah it's it's unbelievable he was against Tik Tok before it helped him in the election this is the epitome of Donald Trump if it's good for me I'm for it if it's not good for me I'm against it and him he doesn't mean American national interest he means the interest of Donald Trump last question for you i know obviously you've been very critical uh of President Trump in his current foreign policy but I'm wondering if you can walk a mile in his shoes is there anything you think he's doing right on the global stage right now well I think the closing of the southern border seems to be going very well he's not doing what he wants to do in terms of deportation he may never be able to but it turns out he he was able to close the border in the first term and he's doing it again now because the principle of deterrence works against illegal immigrants too if they think they're going to walk across Central America and Mexico and get to the Rio Grand and not get in they're sensible enough not to leave their homes to begin with what happened in the Biden administration was with great fanfare 26:01 they said they were going to eliminate the policies that Trump had put in place so all across Latin America they started packing their bags again and and heading for America i think most Americans favor more immigration but that we should pick who comes in and not the immigrants themselves so he's got himself a victory on that score i don't think there's any question about it well thank you Ambassador Bolton i know uh a lot of people want to talk to you about this signal gate so appreciate your time well thanks for having me [Music]

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