There is so much out there now on John Bolton, and very little of it is positive and validating of Bolton, other than assertions by his fan club here and here. Laura Rozen has done a great job of not only reporting Bolton Battle news but creating context to understand the issues.
The National Security Agency has now recommended that the intercept material and the names of U.S. officials requested by John Bolton be released to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. TWN does not know the terms by which the material will be handled.
If folks feel like making calls, Lamar Alexander would be a good person with whom to have a discussion on John Bolton. His number is (202)224-4944. Senator Alexander is a thoughtful, balanced person.
A. Elizabeth Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, publicly stated that John Bolton, her colleague, regularly violated State Department rules on travel and notification of meetings. According to AP’s Barry Schweid, Jones said that Bolton’s behavior was “symptomatic of his determination not to work with other people.
The New York Times‘ Douglas Jehl has an excellent summary of the John Wolf and Robert Hutchings interviews here. Dafna Linzer’s informative Washington Post article on the same subject is available here. I think both sew in different items that are worth considering.
A completely unanticipated development in the NSA intercepts issue was that unnamed senior level sources who are cleared but refuse to say much more indicated that NM Governor Bill Richardson may be part of the package of NSA intercepts interest exhibited by John Bolton. This may or may not be true.
This morning, National Journal‘s “Inside Washington” ran a short piece on the Bolton fiasco and gave TWN a shout out. The clip reads: Inside Washington, National Journal, 30 April 2005 Washington: Take Note of Who Is Joltin’ Bolton Although the nomination of John Bolton to be U.S.
TWN has just learned from a senior level source that former Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation John Wolf has been interviewed by Republican and Democrat staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and validated that John Bolton demonstrated patterned and frequent vindictive behavior towards numerous subordinates at the State Department.
John Bolton refused to live by the rules that other diplomats, career and non-career, had to live by working at the State Department. Bolton is being irresponsibly rewarded by President Bush and Dick Cheney for violating every rule in the book when it came to serving the U.S.
Sid Blumenthal has written a blistering critique of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s position on John Bolton, making the lucid and appropriate point that whereas Colin Powell has frequently put the interests of the nation above loyalty to those on petty power trips, Rice seems to be doing the opposite.
