John Bolton Says He Briefed Trump On Strait of Hormuz Scenarios That the President Now Claims Ignorance About

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton told CNN he briefed President Donald Trump on multiple Iran retaliation scenarios during his first term, despite the president now claiming he’s “shocked” by Iran’s actions.

Bolton, who served under Trump before a public falling out, joined CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday evening, where he was surprised to hear Trump had “indicated” he wasn’t made aware of the potential of retaliatory strikes Iran has since made against neighboring countries and the Strait of Hormuz, where a significant amount of the world’s oil moves through.

“The president seemed to indicate yesterday that he had not been briefed on the potential that Iran might strike out at its neighbors or try to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Is that conceivable to you that he would not have been briefed on those potential those potential, you know repercussions?” Cooper asked Bolton.

Bolton noted he’s long been a supporter of a “regime change campaign” in Iran — though he’s acknowledged “mistakes” Trump’s made with his strikes — and it’s one of the issues that set him at odds with officials in Trump’s first administration. He said he brought up scenarios of striking Iran multiple times and retaliatory strikes in the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere were always brought up.

He told Cooper:

Well, I know for a fact that he was aware of those potentials. I raised the option of regime change in Iran several times during the time I was national security advisor. I never persuaded the president to adopt that position. And one reason was that others had different views, and every time I raised it, they raised a whole long list of difficulties that are entailed by a regime change campaign and that if you’re going to embark on it you better have answers to them and certainly closing the Strait of Hormuz was always one of them and so were attacks on the Gulf Arab states, particularly their oil infrastructure so he knew about it in his first term. I find it hard to believe that he forgot about it in the intervening years.

“They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” Trump said on Monday at a Kennedy Center board meeting. “Those missiles were set to go after them. So, they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

He added that none of the “greatest experts” thought Iran “was going to hit.”

Watch above via CNN.

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