Even though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to swap Meng Wanzhou for the two Canadians held in China, Donald Trump was quite prepared to use her as a bargaining chip in trade talks with China. This from Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton in a CBC interview. Trudeau said he would not trade Meg who is under house arrest in Vancouver pending an extradition hearing. US authorities asked Canada to detain and extradite the Huawei executive.
Bolton said he and other advisers repeatedly told Trump the prosecution of Huawei, along with its high-profile chief financial officer Meng, was key to U.S. national security interests and protecting the integrity of its financial markets.
He said it wasn’t an anti-China move, “although I do think Huawei is effectively an arm of the Chinese state. This was something critical to our maintaining pressure on Iran and integrity in American financial markets.”
Despite all that, Trump raised the Meng case, not just publicly but in one-on-one talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and offered to drop the case against the Huawei executive as part of a broader trade deal, Bolton says in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened.”
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