daniel chigunwe
WASHINGTON. – John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations and former White House national security adviser, said on Tuesday that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries.
Bolton made the remarks to CNN after the day’s congressional hearing into the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the US Capito
l. The panel’s lawmakers on Tuesday accused former President Donald Trump of inciting the violence in a last-ditch bid to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
Speaking to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, however, Bolton suggested Trump was not competent enough to pull off a “carefully planned coup d’etat,” later adding: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat – not here but you know (in) other places – it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he (Trump) did.”
Tapper asked Bolton which attempts he was referring to.
“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” Bolton said, before mentioning Venezuela.
“It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”
Bolton devotes considerable space to Venezuela policy in The Room Where It Happened, his 2020 memoir of his work for Trump.
In 2019, Bolton as national security adviser publicly supported Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido’s call for the military to back his effort to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro, arguing that Maduro’s re-election was illegitimate. Ultimately Maduro remained in power.
“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me (beyond Venezuela),” the CNN anchor said, prompting a reply from Bolton: “I’m sure there is.”
Before Bolton joined the Trump administration, it was widely reported that Trump wanted to use the US military to oust Maduro. In August 2017, Trump told reporters: “We have many options for Venezuela, this is our neighbour.”
Among other gambits, Bolton’s book describes work with the British government to freeze Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England.
In his newsletter, The Racket, Jonathan M Katz, author of the book Gangsters of Capitalism, said: “The United States has indeed sponsored and participated in lots of coups and foreign government overthrows, dating back to the turn of the 20th century [and] Bolton was personally involved in many of the recent efforts – in Nicaragua, Iraq, Haiti and others”.
But, Katz added: “Generally, officials do not admit that sort of thing on camera.”
Katz wrote: “Keep in mind that throughout the 2019 crisis, Bolton insisted that the Trump administration’s support for … Guaidó … was anything but a coup. He literally stood in front of the White House at the height of the affair and told reporters: “This is clearly not a coup!”
In those remarks, in April 2019, Bolton said: “We recognize Juan Guaidó as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela.
Many foreign policy experts have over the years criticized Washington’s history of interventions in other countries, from its role in the 1953 overthrowing of then Iranian nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Vietnam war, to its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan this century.
But it is highly unusual for U.S. officials to openly acknowledge their role in stoking unrest in foreign countries.
“John Bolton, who’s served in highest positions in the U.S. government, including UN ambassador, casually boasting about he’s helped plan coups in other countries,” Dickens Olewe, a BBC journalist from Kenya, wrote on Twitter. – Agencies
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