Former White House national security adviser John Bolton said Tuesday that it was a “mistake” to believe the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was part of a “carefully planned coup d’etat” by President Donald Trump.
“That’s not the way Donald Trump does things,” Bolton told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead.” “It’s rambling from one half, vast idea to another, one plan that falls through and another comes up — that’s what he was doing.”
Then Bolton claimed to have firsthand experience orchestrating coups. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did,” Bolton told Tapper.
Bolton’s comments were unusual, as U.S. officials have generally avoided the using term “coup” when speaking about U.S. foreign policy matters. The remarks went viral, with one clip on Twitter amassing more than 2 million views by early Wednesday.
Tapper later pressed Bolton to elaborate on his “expertise having planned coups,” asking whether they were “successful coups.”
Bolton responded that in his 2020 memoir, he wrote about the United States’ support for an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2019.
“Not that we had all that much to do with it,” Bolton said, “but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed.”
The remarks Tuesday were a departure from Bolton’s previous statements about Venezuela. “This...
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