If you're one of President Trump's former national security advisers, you're doing a lot of waiting these days — either for your book to be published or for your prison sentence to be decided.
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was Trump's second national security adviser, serving from March 2017 to April 2018. He came on board after Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned; Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with the former Russian ambassador to the United States.
McMaster has written a book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, set to be published on April 28. HarperCollins says it is a "groundbreaking reassessment of America's place in the world, drawing from McMaster's long engagement with these issues, including 34 years of service in the U.S. Army with multiple tours of duty in battlegrounds overseas." It will also include information on McMaster's "13 months as national security adviser in the Trump White House."
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Unlike other former members of the administration, McMaster, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has not given many interviews about his experience with Trump. One of his aides was quoted in the book A Very Stable Genius as saying, "The president doesn't fire people. He just tortures them until they're willing to quit."
Trump's third national security adviser, John Bolton, finished writing his book, The Room Where It Happened, last year. It is supposed to come out in March, but the White House is reportedly trying to block its release. Bolton, who served from April 2018 to September 2019, is said to have included damaging information in the book, including that Trump attempted to get him to engage in a quid pro quo with Ukraine.
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