In a withering behind-the-scenes portrayal, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton accused him of sweeping misdeeds that included explicitly seeking Chinese President Xi Jinping's help to win the coming re-election.

Bolton (above), a longtime foreign policy hawk who Trump fired in September over policy differences, also said that the US president had expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations to give "personal favours to dictators he liked", according to a book excerpt published in the New York Times...