John Bolton's book excerpt claims in 2019 President Trump offered to reverse Huawei's criminal prosecution if China agreed to a trade deal

President Donald Trump’s conversations with China President Xi Jinping reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in President Trump’s mind of his own political interests and US national interests. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce US regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms’ flouting of US sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most important goal for Chinese “companies” like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the US characterization of their activities). 

President Trump, by contrast, saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an opportunity to make personal gestures to President Xi. In 2018, for example, he reversed penalties that Sec Ross and the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE. In 2019, he offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the trade deal—which, of course, was primarily about getting President Trump re-elected in 2020. These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency.