Pompeo says Bolton shut out of meetings because ‘he was leaking’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo zeroed in on John Bolton’s credibility in recent interviews, describing the former national security adviser as someone who was routinely shut out of White House meetings because he leaked, lied or stretched the truth about what was discussed.

“I haven’t read the book in its entirety, but the excerpts I’ve seen, there’s lots of falsehoods, there’s lot of lies contained there,” Pompeo said in an interview Monday with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“The president and others, myself included, had to cut him out of meetings because he was leaking or he’d twist things or he’d lie,” he said. “It was a really difficult situation where John Bolton thought he was more important than the president of the United States and the American people.”

In an interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Tuesday, Pompeo took aim at the title of the White House memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” and the insider access Bolton claimed to enjoy during his 17 months in the administration.

“I was in the room, too. I was present for those. I remember them very differently. These are things that have been either fully spun or are, frankly, just lies that don’t reflect what truly happened there,” Pompeo told Hewitt.

“The truth is he was such a difficult person and leaked so much information, even while he was still in office, that it was often the case that he wasn’t a participant in the meetings because we all had come to see that there was a real risk that this information would end up in places it shouldn’t have,” the country’s top diplomat said.

In an interview with ABC News, Bolton said the president’s policies jeopardize national security.

“The biggest fear I have is that his policymaking is so incoherent, so unfocused, so unstructured, so wrapped around his own personal political fortunes, that mistakes are being made that will have grave consequences for the national security of the United States,” he said.

But Pompeo defended Trump in the Hannity interview.

“This president’s foreign policy is something that John Bolton should have been proud of, and instead, he stepped away in a way that fundamentally misrepresents what we’ve done,” he said.

Building on the administration’s claim that Bolton has included classified information in his tome, which was released on Tuesday, Pompeo compared him to Edward Snowden – the former CIA contractor who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency.

“The information he has released puts criminal liability squarely on him.  We all saw what’s happened when people leak classified information like Edward Snowden. What John Bolton did here is not dissimilar from that,” he said.  “And while we’ll leave open for the Justice Department to take its action, this kind of information getting out, it presents real risk and real harm to the United States of America.”

The White House tried to block publication of the book on those grounds but a federal judge ruled against it last week, but noted that Bolton appeared not to have completed the government’s review of classified material.

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