Trump on Huawei, China and Bitcoin in Bolton's book

The book "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir" just published by John Robert Bolton, former United States National Security Advisor fired by Donald Trump last September, sheds light on some of the background that led to the decisions made at the desk of the Oval Office. These also include those concerning the Huawei ban and relations with China, a complex affair that for over a year now has seen the Shenzhen company included in the Entity List of the Overseas Department of Commerce.

Background of the White House in the book by John R. Bolton In short, the President would have taken into consideration the pressures from Wilbur Ross (Secretary of Commerce) and other representatives of the authorities regarding an alleged espionage activity of the company Asian (as well as ZTE) by treating the issue not as a political, technological or diplomatic problem, but as an opportunity to wrest a commercial agreement with Beijing and in perspective to exploit the consequent benefit in terms of public consensus for his re-election in autumn 2020. All this at the delicate moment when negotiations were underway for the supply of the components to be used for the construction of the 5G networks.

In a conversation with Steven Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury) which Bolton assisted in the first Personally, Trump would also have asked to intervene harshly on the circulation of cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin, by curbing the free exchange of virtual currency. The tycoon has repeatedly expressed itself with a critical opinion towards cryptocurrencies, calling them "non-currencies" unlike the dollar or the euro.

Source: The Wall Street Journal