“As someone who helped plan coups — not here but, you know, in other places — there’s a lot of work to be done,” Bolton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Bolton began his remarks about the past coup plotter by taking issue with Mr Tapper’s claim that “you don’t have to be clever to attempt a coup”. He then blasted President Donald Trump, his former boss, for doing all the work he implied he did in his previous conspiracy. “He just went from one idea to another,” Bolton said of Trump. “Finally, he unleashed the rioters on the capital. There is no doubt about that.” When Mr. Tapper asked Mr. Bolton to specify which countries he has planned coups, Mr. Bolton referred to material he wrote about in a recent book about U.S. activities in Venezuela in 2018 and 2019 when he served as a national adviser. security and The US officially recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s president. “I wrote about Venezuela in the book and it turned out not to be successful – not that we had that much to do with it,” Mr Bolton said. “But I saw what it took for an opposition to try to overthrow an illegally elected president, and they failed. The idea that Donald Trump was half-assed by the Venezuelan opposition is ridiculous.” Mr Tapper told his guest he felt “there are other things you’re not telling me about”, to which Mr Bolton replied: “I’m sure there are”. Mr. Bolton has enjoyed a long career in the upper echelons of the US foreign policy apparatus. He served as Assistant Attorney General under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, worked at the State Department for George H.W. Bush, and was the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush. Trump brought him back to the White House as National Security Adviser in 2018. He resigned about a year and a half later. Throughout his career, Bolton was known as an extreme hawk – a member of the conservative movement that consistently favored a muscular foreign policy and US regime change in non-white majority countries. Mr Bolton has at various points supported US military intervention in countries ranging from Iran to Libya to Cuba and praised far-right leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro as “like-minded” partners.
