It has been noted that former National Security Advisor John Bolton told MSNBC Jen Psaki on Sunday that former President Donald Trump was obsessed with collecting classified material while in office.
Earlier this week the Department of Justice indicted the 45th president with 37 counts related to his handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago estate. If convicted, Trump could potentially spend the rest of his life in prison.
After he departed the administration, Bolton and Trump had a very public falling out, which included Trump trying to stop the release of Bolton’s memoir The Room Where it Happened.
During an interview with Psaki on Sunday, Bolton claimed he witnessed first hand Trump’s habit of storing classified material given to him by intelligence during his tenure.
“I think he was kind of a collector of things that he thought were of interest to him for some reason or another. Clippings, mementos, classified documents,” Bolton told the MSNBC host. “It was very disturbing.”
He added, “We could see in the course of meetings with him, intelligence briefings, decision meetings that sometimes he liked to retain things. And it became the practice just to make sure that we got them back in as many cases as we could. Obviously, we failed in many cases, but it was a it was a pattern that was evident to me from sort of my early.”
Bolton noted that one interaction with Trump that disturbed him was when the former president tweeted classified pictures of a failed Iranian missile launch given to him by intelligence officials.
“There’s no conceivable reason for that, except it made him feel good to be able to do it. That’s one example. But it’s typical of the mindset, in my view,” Bolton concluded.
