[PHONE RINGING]

peter baker

Hello.

michael barbaro

Hey, Peter. It’s Michael Barbaro.

peter baker

Hey, how are you?

michael barbaro

Good, good, good. I imagine I’m catching you absolutely in the thick of it.

peter baker

Yes.

michael barbaro

Just how in the thick of it?

peter baker

Like crashing. What’s going on?

michael barbaro

OK. We saw the president’s tweet about John Bolton being out as National Security Advisor, and I wonder if I could just ask you a few questions about it, or is now just not a good time?

peter baker

Yeah. I think it would be better not to.

michael barbaro

OK.

peter baker

Is that all right? Sorry.

michael barbaro

Yes. We’ll talk in a little bit.

peter baker

OK. Thanks, bye.

michael barbaro

OK, bye. [SNAZZY MUSIC] From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. And this is “The Daily.” Today, Peter Baker eventually takes the call and explains what happened to John Bolton. It’s Wednesday, September 11th. Peter.

peter baker

Hello.

michael barbaro

Hi.

peter baker

Hi there. How are you?

michael barbaro

What a difference a day makes. Little 24 hours.

peter baker

Just another day in crazy town, as John Kelly would call it.

michael barbaro

Right. John Kelly. Him. So yesterday, Peter, you were telling us that President Trump was calling off a peace deal with the Taliban, which is exactly what his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was pushing for. And that felt like a John Bolton win. Now today, Bolton has either been fired or he quit, depending on who you believe. So how do you square those two?

peter baker

Well, sometimes you can win a policy fight and lose the war, right? In this case, Bolton did get what he wanted in terms of ending the negotiations, at least for now, with the Taliban. But he had so worn down his relationship with the president that, by less than 24 hours later, he’s out of a job.

archived recording (stephen colbert) Welcome to The Late Show. I’m your host, Stephen Colbert.

peter baker

After we talked yesterday, there was a confrontation between the president and Bolton over this very topic.

archived recording (stephen colbert) Donald Trump’s invited the Taliban to Camp David the weekend before 9/11. That’s like — there’s nothing that’s like that.

peter baker

People in Vice President Mike Pence’s camp were upset at Bolton because of a story —

archived recording (stephen colbert) Both Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Advisor John Bolton thought it was a mistake, but according to —

peter baker

— that had come out saying that Pence had also been against the Camp David meeting with the Taliban. That was perceived by Pence’s people as a way from Bolton’s camp to basically enlist allies to say, hey, it wasn’t just him.

archived recording (stephen colbert) But according to people familiar with the talks, Trump wanted to be the deal maker who would put the final parts together himself, or at least be perceived to be. So.

peter baker

They deeply resented that. That was blamed on Bolton, fairly or not, and so by the time the president talked with Bolton last night, feelings were really raw.

michael barbaro

Right, because Bolton had opposed the Camp David meeting, and so the thinking is that Bolton would have been the one, or people around him, to get the word out that, oh, I’m not alone. Look, even the Vice President opposed this meeting.

peter baker

Exactly, and for months, the president had been kind of bristling at what he perceived to be John Bolton’s overly hawkish view of the world.

archived recording (donald trump) John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him, he’d take on the whole world at one time, OK?

peter baker

You know, he would even joke about that.

archived recording (donald trump) I actually temper John, which is pretty amazing, isn’t it?

peter baker

He was the peacemaker among the two.

archived recording (donald trump) Nobody thought that was going to — I’m the one that tempers him, but that’s OK. I have different sides. I mean, I have John Bolton, and I have other people that are a little more dovish than him.

peter baker

And in some ways, that was true because Bolton didn’t like a lot of this diplomacy that was going on, didn’t like dealing with the North Koreans or the Iranians or the Taliban. He didn’t trust any of them. He didn’t think that the United States should get in bed with these bad actors.

archived recording (john bolton) Yeah, here’s an all-purpose insult that you can use. I’ll apply it to the North Koreans. Question, how do you know when the North Korean regime is lying? Answer, when their lips are moving.

peter baker

Whereas the president, as you know, is somebody who’s looking for the big deal. He’s going to make a deal with the Taliban. Maybe he’ll make a deal with Iran.

archived recording (donald trump) Again, I think Iran has tremendous economic potential, and I look forward to letting them get back to the stage where they can show that.

peter baker

And that was at the core of the very big difference between him and his National Security Advisor.

michael barbaro

So what happens this morning?

peter baker

Well, the morning begins actually kind of normal in the White House. There was a meeting of the national security team in the Situation Room. It was chaired by John Bolton, as it should normally be without the president. A couple hours later, the White House scheduled a briefing that Bolton was going to give in the White House briefing room to the press, along with Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, to talk about terrorism efforts. Then —

archived recording Dramatic breaking news, just as we begin the hour. The President of the United States announcing on Twitter, his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, is leaving.

peter baker

— right around noon comes the tweet from the president.

archived recording See the tweet from the president right there. I asked for John, for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor this week.

peter baker

Within minutes, though, comes another tweet.

archived recording In a surreal moment, 12 minutes later —

peter baker

This one from John Bolton.

archived recording — Bolton denied he was fired, tweeting, I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, let’s talk tomorrow.

peter baker

He’s saying that he offered his resignation and that the president had accepted. In other words, it was his idea, not the president’s. So I went ahead and texted him just to make sure we were understanding that he’s giving us a different version. He was disputing the president.

michael barbaro

You texted John Bolton.

peter baker

I texted John Bolton on his phone, and he texted back, offered last night without his asking. Slept on it and gave it to him this morning. So John Bolton is disputing the version that the president gave. He’s saying it’s not true.

michael barbaro

And Peter, what happens to that press conference where Bolton was supposed to talk?

peter baker

Well, they still had a briefing —

archived recording (steve mnuchin) Hello, everybody. So Secretary Pompeo and I are here today to talk about the president’s new executive order.

peter baker

— with Pompeo and Mnuchin, the secretaries of State and Treasury, and they’re there to talk about —

archived recording (steve mnuchin) Fighting global terrorism.

peter baker

— terrorism, financing, and how they’re planning to be tougher on terrorism, as we have the anniversary of 9/11.

archived recording (mike pompeo) At this time, Secretary Mnuchin and I are happy to take a couple of questions on this topic.

peter baker

But of course, everybody in the room wants to ask about —

archived recording (reporter) Did John Bolton get fired or did he quit, and did he —

peter baker

— what happened to Bolton? And what the back story is, of course, is that Pompeo and Bolton have been at odds for months. They have been in this epic feud over, basically, the ear of the president. They share some of the same policy views. They’re both pretty hawkish conservatives. But Pompeo has done more to stay within the president’s good graces, I would say, than John Bolton.

archived recording (reporter) Did he leave the White House because he disagreed with you in particular over talks with the Taliban?

peter baker

So we asked Pompeo about this in the briefing room.

archived recording (mike pompeo) Uh, I’ll leave it to the president to talk about the reasons he made decision, but I would say this. The president’s entitled to the staff that he wants.

peter baker

And I had to say, there were no tears shed on his part for John Bolton. He said, look, the president deserved to have somebody he trusts and values.

archived recording (mike pompeo) There were many times Ambassador Bolton I disagreed. That’s to be sure.

peter baker

And he very openly said, look, I had a lot of disagreements. So he wasn’t trying to even pretend that they didn’t have a rivalry.

archived recording (mike pompeo) There were definitely places that ambassador and I had different views about how we should proceed.

peter baker

At one point, they were asked —

archived recording (reporter) Were you two blindsided by what occurred today?

peter baker

— were they blindsided by this. And both of them grinned.

archived recording (mike pompeo) I’m never surprised.

peter baker

And Pompeo said, I’m not surprised by anything. I’m never surprised, he said.

archived recording (mike pompeo) And I don’t mean that on just this issue.

michael barbaro

If Pompeo and Bolton are both hawks, help me understand what a difference might look like for them. For example, how did Bolton handle Afghanistan and the Taliban talks versus Pompeo?

peter baker

Well that’s one area where they were at odds. Pompeo was more favorable toward the talks because he knew the president was for it. In other words, if he were left to his own devices, it might not be his particular choice, but Pompeo was more willing to subordinate his views to his president’s. And that was the lesson he learned from Rex Tillerson, who didn’t do that, the first Secretary of State, and ended up getting fired as a result. Bolton, in some ways, was, policy wise, very different than Rex Tillerson, but in terms of not simply going along to get along, he was less willing to simply go along with policy ideas that he didn’t favor. Where he probably went crosswise is, the president and his people value loyalty. And they never quite accepted Bolton as a member of the team.

michael barbaro

Does all of that, in the end, kind of suggest to you that despite this dispute over exactly what happened — no, I wasn’t fired. I resigned. No, I fired you — that in the end it sounds like it was Trump who pushed out Bolton?

peter baker

Well, look, I mean, the relationship was broken. It was inevitable that this was going to happen. Whether it was going to happen today or some other day, it doesn’t really matter that much because we knew that he overstayed his welcome. In other words, he was no longer really going to be welcome in that White House.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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archived recording (larissa anderson) I’m Larissa Anderson. I am one of the people that make “The Daily,” and I’m also one of the people who made a show called “Caliphate.” It’s a show that follows Rukmini Callimachi as she reports on ISIS. I can remember the first time I heard the interview Rick Meaney and our producer, Andy Mills, had done with a former ISIS member. He confesses to things he does as part of the group’s religious police. It felt like such a rare interview. When we had our doubts about the story he told us, we pulled on every lever we had to get to the bottom of it. We leaned on reporters with sources in national security agencies. We used the full muscle of The New York Times newsroom to get to the truth of his story. I can’t think of another place this story could come together, and that is what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times. We are setting out to make stories that only The New York Times can tell. So if you want to support our efforts to keep bringing shows like this to you, please subscribe to The New York Times. And thank you.

michael barbaro

So Peter, I guess the question here is, why hire a National Security Advisor who is so fundamentally different from you on the issue of national security?

peter baker

Well, that’s a great question. What President Trump liked about John Bolton —

archived recording anchor Joining me right now, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Ambassador John Bolton. Good to see you, ambassador.

peter baker

We’re seeing him on Fox News, and very aggressively articulating a conservative point of view.

archived recording (john bolton) People have talked about closing this border for a long time. I was in the Reagan administration when we passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, a lot of which was, close the borders.

peter baker

He thought that Bolton was kind of a like-minded pugilistic version of a political figure. They do share some things. This idea of America First does play into John Bolton’s philosophy as well. He describes himself as an American nationalist. He’s not all that thrilled with the allies. Neither is President Trump. He doesn’t really believe in the U.N. or allies or international organizations. He doesn’t think that they’re very effective or that the United States should be subordinating itself to them. Neither does President Trump. What he missed was that Bolton’s view is very different than his own view, than President Trump’s view, on a lot of these big issues. On North Korea, where President Trump wanted to negotiate with Kim Jong Un, and John Bolton thought that was probably unwise.

archived recording (john bolton) There’s not a lot of time to waste here. Talking to the North Koreans is a waste of time.

peter baker

On Iran —

archived recording (john bolton) How long would it take for Iran to get a deliverable nuclear weapon? Roughly one day after North Korea gets it.

peter baker

— where just a couple of months ago, John Bolton teed up a retaliatory strike for the downing of an American surveillance drone, and the president pulled it back at the last minute, right? On Russia, John Bolton, much, much tougher, much more skeptical of Vladimir Putin’s Russia than the president, would never invite them back into the G7 the way the president has talked about. And finally, of course, these last few days, we see highlighted in this very big dramatic way —

archived recording (john bolton) There’s no blind trust in the Taliban in this administration. That’s for sure.

peter baker

— the idea of negotiating with the Taliban.

michael barbaro

Peter, it seems like Bolton did ultimately have an outsized influence over these huge foreign policy issues that you just outlined. He wanted the U.S. to be out of the Iran nuclear deal. The U.S. is now out. He opposed peace talks with Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Those talks have more or less stalled, right? He opposed a peace deal with the Taliban. The president just said, those are over. Not bad.

peter baker

Yeah, in some ways, that’s true, obviously, but it depends on the issue. On Iran, for instance —

archived recording (donald trump) And I’m not looking to hurt Iran at all. I’m looking to have Iran say, no nuclear weapons. We have enough problems in this world right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran. And I think we’ll make a deal.

peter baker

He was pushing on an open door. The president agreed with John Bolton’s view of the Iran nuclear deal. They both thought it was a terrible idea, that it was giving Iran too much leeway, and that they should get out. So they agreed on that. But they didn’t agree on, for instance, regime change. That’s something that Bolton has always favored in Iran. The president has now publicly said, several times, I’m not for regime change.

archived recording (donald trump) These are great people. It has a chance to be a great country, with the same leadership. We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons.

peter baker

On North Korea, you’re right. The talks are stalled. That certainly pleased John Bolton because he thought that they’re counterproductive and dangerous, but it probably wasn’t because of him. It was really more because of Kim not coming to the table with anything meaningful. So in a lot of ways, John Bolton did have a lot of influence. He particularly helped, for instance, pull the United States out of some treaties, like the I.N.F. Treaty with Russia, but his successes were in areas where he was working with the president’s own instinct, where he was going in the same direction. Where he got in trouble was where he was fighting against the tide.

michael barbaro

I’m struck by the fact that the thing you say the president liked most about Bolton, his pugilism, his combative style, is also kind of what cost Bolton his job, right?

peter baker

Yeah. I mean, this was something people said even 17 months ago when he was hired. When he was hired, people would say, well, I don’t know. I put those two in a room, the inevitable clash is going to eventually drive them apart. To some people, what’s actually surprising is that it took this long. But he viewed his job as how to stop bad deals from happening. In fact, within minutes of his resigning, I talked with a person who’s close to Bolton, who said, look, for the 17 months that John Bolton was National Security Advisor, there were no bad deals. That’s his view. And we’ve seen this before, where people who surround the president view their job as stopping the president from doing things that they consider to be bad, right? In Rex Tillerson’s case, for instance, it was the other way around. He wanted to stop the president from being too combative in the world. John Bolton wanted to stop the president from being too naive, in his view, too willing to get in bed with bad actors who can’t be trusted. In both cases, it didn’t end up well.

michael barbaro

So Bolton is leaving with all these same foreign policy matters largely unresolved, which is, I guess, a problem for the next National Security Advisor. So what do you think ends up happening next? And what can you tell us about who you suspect the president will choose for that job and what it will tell us about how he’s thinking about those issues?

peter baker

Right. Exactly. I mean, the president said today that he will name somebody next week. Now it suggests he has, perhaps, somebody in mind, and one of the names, for instance, we’ve heard is a guy named Steve Biegun. Steve Biegun Is a former George W. Bush administration official who has been President Trump’s chief negotiator with the North Koreans.

archived recording (steve biegun) I fully understand the importance of this job. The issues are tough, and they will be tough to resolve. But the president has created an opening, and it’s one that we must take by seizing every possible opportunity to realize the vision for a peaceful future for the people of North Korea.

peter baker

That would seem to tell you, if he picks Biegun, that he’s looking for somebody on the opposite side of Bolton when it comes to some of these diplomacy issue, somebody who’s willing to talk with some of these bad actors in order to try to negotiate some sort of an agreement. On the other hand, if he picks a different figure, somebody who’s more hardline like John Bolton, maybe you’ll see that the policies won’t change. And the question really would be more about personality and fit and chemistry. So we’re looking to see who the choice is because it will be telling in figuring out where the president will go in this next year before re-election.

michael barbaro

So Peter, finally, what are you thinking about on this fine afternoon, besides the fact that “The Daily” calls you all the time now?

peter baker

Well, this is a really interesting moment in foreign policy because we do have all these balls up in the air. And we can’t tell whether or not any of them are going to come to fruition or not, right? The president is talking with, or talking about talking with, North Korea, Iran, the Taliban, Afghanistan.

michael barbaro

Literally, some of our greatest adversaries in history.

peter baker

Biggest enemies, greatest adversaries. If he were to pull off what he wanted to pull off, it would reshape the world and America’s place in it. But, and there’s a big but, none these are guaranteed. These are all super hard, super entrenched disputes that have gone through many, many presidencies before without being resolved. And so he has set himself up for either a big win or a big loss, depending on how it turns out over these months to come.

michael barbaro

I get the sense that John Bolton would like to tell the story of what really happened, and I hope you will then share with us.

peter baker

I’m looking forward to sitting down with him and hearing the story.

michael barbaro

We’ll talk to you then. Thank you, Peter.

peter baker

Thank you.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording Today, I informed my intention —

^archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)^

[HEBREW]

archived recording — with the establishment of the next government, to apply Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and North Dead Sea.

michael barbaro

In a speech on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised that if re-elected next week, he would annex nearly a third of the occupied West Bank.

archived recording So I speak to you, citizens of the state of Israel —

^archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)^

[HEBREW]

archived recording — for the sake of future generations, and future generations give me the power to guarantee Israel’s security, give me the power to determine Israel’s borders. Thank you very much.

michael barbaro