John Bolton’s book reveals extent of Ivanka Trump scandal

| 2:00 pm EDT June 19, 2020
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

I will begin by making the obligatory and far from reluctant observation that John Bolton is human scum. We sometimes lose track of the fact that in a world of Hitlers, the Albert Speers of the world occasionally look good by comparison, though not by any objective standard. Notwithstanding Bolton referring to Trump’s attempt to extort assistance from Ukraine to help him cheat in the 2020 election as a “drug deal,” Bolton was and remains a war hawk and a bigot.

Bolton fought in court to keep from testifying before Congress about what dirt he had on Trump at Trump’s impeachment hearing, but demonstrated no scruples about cynically using that dirt to make money on a best-selling book. And whether you like it or not, “The Room Where It Happened” isn’t just going to be a bestseller, it will also possibly make Bolton an eight figure income. (If he’s not there already, of course. World class political weasels like Bolton are seldom strangers to money.)

We already know what revelations are coming. The book has been distributed by the thousands to journalists and reviewers and its acid anecdotes and scandalous revelations are already known to them. So Donald Trump’s attempt to foil the book’s publication in court is laughable, unless of course his only goal is to hurt Bolton economically. But the damage has been done to Trump’s vertiginously precarious ego already, and Trump’s ham-handed attempt to conceal the book’s revelations is having the predictable Streisand Effect.

Of the Bolton disclosures being reported in the press, an intriguing one is that Trump defended Mohammed bin Salman, the suspected mastermind behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in a deliberate effort to distract attention away from his daughter Ivanka’s email scandal.

It turns out a contemporaneous story about Ivanka using her personal email account for government business before she was actually working for the government was circulating at the time. As you may recall, during the 2016 presidential campaign, it emerged that Hillary Clinton used her personal email account to conduct State Department business from home. This caused a great deal of counterfeit horror and screeching, histrionic pearl-clutching among Republican criminals at the time.

Many pretended to believe she should go to prison for it, which caused Trump’s drooling, low-information, low-IQ base to actually believe it. It’s little wonder that Trump, who was among the idiots calling for Hillary’s imprisonment for an offense so minor he would have laughed at it privately, was the biggest proponent of the movement to “lock her up” for it.

So when his daughter committed a similar (admittedly) minor offense, one that realistically should merit nothing stronger than a rebuke from the State Department, Trump naturally wanted to create a diversion. Perhaps he was unaware that such hypocrisies don’t get noticed any longer, or that the real crime was the conflict of interest represented by the 18 trademarks Ivanka received from China while Donald Trump was conducting trade negotiations with that country. Appearance is what matters. But even Ivanka’s trademark conflict of interest came to nothing, because the Trumps get away with everything — in case you haven’t noticed.

For now, anyway. Donald Trump is in for a big shock when he wakes up on November 4th and finds out how the world really looks when all of his political capital is gone. Trump is in store for 78 days from hell, when few will care about, let alone respect, a lame duck president who is arguably the most hated man on earth. Let’s make sure that happens and vote for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. as President of the United States on November 3rd. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.