A top trade official in the Trump administration said it's "absolutely untrue" that he overheard the president begging Chinese leader Xi Jinping to buy agricultural products to help win reelection in the United States.
That's one of several claims made by former national security adviser John Bolton in his new book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir."
United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer denied the claim from an excerpted portion of Bolton's book, while speaking at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday as seen on C-SPAN. The interchange starts an hour and nine and half minutes in on the tape.
"There was a meeting in on the outskirts of the G-20, in Osaka between the president and President Xi, and I was in that meeting," Lighthizer said during a Senate hearing Wednesday. "Absolutely untrue. Never happened," Lighthizer said of the allegation. "I was there. I've no recollection of that ever happening. I don't believe it's true. I don't believe it ever happened."
Lighthizer continued: "I don't want you to think I'm being deceptive. I said what meeting I was at, and this never happened at it. For sure."
In his book, Bolton details a meeting during the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan. He accused Trump of turning "the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win."
“He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise,” Bolton wrote.
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