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Tuesday’s hearing of the House committee investigating the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021, riot at the Capitol led to a remarkable admission: A member of President Donald Trump’s senior team confessed to having plotted a coup.

But not the attempted coup that occurred on Jan. 6, and not a member of Trump’s team at that point.

The admission came from former national security adviser John Bolton, and it came with the caveat that the coups he had planned were targeted at foreign countries.

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Bolton <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/13/john-bolton-coup/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social" target=_blank>made the surprising claim</a> during an interview Tuesday with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Bolton was fired by Trump in late 2019, just before the country learned of the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into announcing a probe of Joe Biden. Since leaving Trump’s team, Bolton has been a fervent critic of his former boss and vice versa.

In the interview, Bolton objected to the idea that the events of Jan. 6 were part of “a carefully planned coup d’etat aimed at the Constitution.” His reasoning was personal: Trump was simply too much of a mess to construct anything that organized.

Tapper disagreed, saying that “one doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”

“I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work,” Bolton said. “And that’s not what he did.”

We can set aside the idea that Trump “didn’t do a lot of work” as he tried to retain power after losing the 2020 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">election</a>. This is subjective, certainly, although one could make a robust case that Trump invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into doing precisely that. Let’s instead just consider what Bolton is blithely copping to here: helping to try to overthrow foreign leaders. He made the admission, it seems, largely so that he could contrast his own brilliance with Trump’s dopiness, but he made the admission, nonetheless.

Tapper, of course, had a follow-up question. It ran along the lines of: Uh, where?

“I wrote about Venezuela in the book, and it turned out not to be successful,” Bolton said. “Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try to overturn an illegally elected president.”

“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me,” Tapper replied.

So let’s assume that there is “other stuff,” no matter how useful it is to Bolton’s public presentation that he be seen as a powerful behind-the-scenes actor. When and where might Bolton have had his fingers in foreign coup events?

The Cline Center at the University of Illinois <a href="https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/project/research-themes/democracy-and-development/coup-detat-project-cdp" target=_blank>tracks</a> coup attempts (including the one in the United States <a href="https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/coup-detat-project-cdp/statement_jan.27.2021" target=_blank>on Jan. 6</a>). Since Bolton joined government during the Reagan administration in 1982, there have been more than 350 coup attempts around the world, nearly 150 of them successful. That includes events (such as Jan. 6) that one might not think of as a coup attempt — like the U.S.-led toppling of the government in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Of those 350-plus coup attempts, 191 occurred when Bolton held a position with the U.S. government. (We will assume that Bolton was not involved in attempted coups while <i>outside</i> government service, although, of course, who knows.) That figure, however, includes coup attempts that occurred when Bolton was in positions that one might assume were less coup-adjacent, like serving as an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or as an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. There were 131 coup attempts internationally that occurred when Bolton served in the State Department, as U.N. ambassador or as Trump’s national security adviser — the tenure during which the Venezuela coup attempt unfolded.

The overlap between coup attempts and Bolton’s service is shown below.

You’ll notice I highlighted several, including both the Afghanistan invasion and the attempts in Venezuela. I did not pick out any coup attempts that occurred while Bolton was with Justice or USAID, assuming that his involvement in any government-led nefariousness would have been limited.

Then Bolton joined State. In October 1989, there was an attempt to oust Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. He was removed from power following an American invasion that December. In 1992, a coup in Afghanistan similarly led to the ouster of the country’s leader, a longtime ally of the Soviet Union. There were also coup attempts in a number of other countries while Bolton served under President George H.W. Bush, including the Philippines, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh and Romania, where General Secretary Nicolae Ceausescu was ousted.

Bolton returned to government under George W. Bush. Besides the invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps the most significant coup tracked by the Cline Center’s Coup D'état Project was the March 2004 removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president of Haiti. Aristide blamed American actors for the coup. But other countries saw similar attempts, including the November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia that ousted the country’s Soviet-allied leader, Eduard Shevardnadze.

In 2018, Bolton became Trump’s third national security adviser. It was during this period that rebels tried more than once to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power, unsuccessfully. Bolton’s attempt to distance himself from the planning of those efforts — “I saw what it took” to effect an overthrow — does little to diminish American involvement.

This, again, was the only coup attempt to which Bolton admitted involvement, despite his telling Tapper that he had helped plan similar insurrections. (In an interview with Newsmax, Bolton dismissed questions about his comments as being a function of “snowflakes out there who don’t understand what you need to do to protect the United States.”) Perhaps he was puffing himself up at Trump’s expense, casting himself as a brilliant strategist who had deigned to work for the fumbling Trump. Or perhaps one of those other 131 coup attempts that occurred while Bolton was in government bear, however faintly, his fingerprints.

The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Ohio State University

Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter <a href="https://wapo.st/3m3QTiy">How To Read This Chart</a> and is the author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/">The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America</a>.

Philip Bump

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