President Trump says he held off on punishing China its forced internment of Uighurs in mass detention camps last year to avoid placing then-ongoing trade negotiations in jeopardy.
The commander-in-chief made the admission in an interview with Axios published Sunday, after being asked why he had not yet enacted sanctions against Chinese Communist Party officials or entities involved in the detaining of Muslim individuals.
“Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal, and I made a great deal, $250 billion potentially worth of purchases. And by the way, they’re buying a lot, you probably have seen,” Trump told the news outlet.
“And when you’re in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we’ve done a lot,” the president continued, “I put tariffs on China, which are far worse than any sanction you can think of.”
Trump signed phase one of the deal with China in January, ending a bitter trade war between the two countries that took place amid months of tense negotiations.
In the months since, the relationship has frayed as the Communist nation has faced a wave of international scrutiny for its lack of transparency at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.
Trump’s comments come following a week of headlines about allegations from his former national security adviser, John Bolton, who is promoting his new tell-all book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” due out Tuesday.
In his memoir, Bolton makes the explosive claim that the president voiced approval for the concentration camps on two occasions.
One of those occasions, according to excerpts of Bolton’s book that have been released thus far, came during the 2019 G20 meeting.
Bolton alleges that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed China’s construction of camps to forcibly detain Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
“According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton wrote.
The second came during a 2017 trip to the Communist nation.
Bolton writes in the memoir that Matt Pottinger — a still-serving White House official, now deputy national security adviser — told him that Trump had approved of the camps.
Speaking to Axios, Trump also pointed to his signing of legislation last Wednesday authorizing sanctions against those Chinese officials responsible for those human rights violations.
In a rare showing of unity on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives passed the legislation 413-1 last month and the Senate passed it unanimously.
The president has denied any allegation that he approved of the camps.
On Wednesday, Trump called Bolton “a liar,” to the Wall Street Journal, saying that “everybody in the White House hated John Bolton,” in response to his claims about the Uighurs.
His administration spent the last week engaged in a legal battle with Bolton’s book publisher Simon & Schuster in an effort to block the book’s publication.
The effort was blocked by a federal judge, who argued the book’s release would be too difficult to block since at least 200,000 copies had already been distributed.