Going Through John Bolton’s Trash

Michael Schmidt has an interesting story in his new book about the scramble to learn what was in John Bolton’s unpublished book during the impeachment of President Trump, Axios reports.

Writes Schmidt: “I received a call from a man I had never heard of. He said that several years earlier he had sat next to my father on a train and he had followed my work. The man said that he worked as a private investigator of sorts in the Washington area and he had been trying to figure out what Bolton had written in his book.”

He continued: “A friend had told him at a Rotary Club meeting that Bolton was taking sections of his book and sending them out to friends to review and comment on.The friends were then mailing them back to him, and he was throwing them in his trash. Bolton had apparently done this because he did not want to create an electronic record of his correspondences. The man said that he had been scouting Bolton’s wife’s office and their house on the nights he put his trash out. After Bolton moved the trash onto the street, he went through it. … He said Thursday morning was trash pickup day in Bolton’s neighborhood.”