Trump thinks Kelley was the source for The Atlantic story.

[gratuitous]

15. "I didn't hear that" isn't exactly "He didn't say that"

Everything these fuckers say has to be parsed eight ways from Sunday. "I was there" could easily mean, "I was on that trip with the President, but not present when Trump and Kelly were at the gravesite." "I didn't hear that" isn't "Trump didn't say that," but simply that Bolton might have missed it because a plane flew overhead or he was standing too far away to hear it. Or he was distracted by a pretty girl who was walking by, or he was on the phone to Putin discussing bounties on American soldiers.

Bolton clearly means for his comment to be a denial that Trump would ever say such a cruel and heartless thing, and if you take it that way, his work is done. But that comment can be interpreted several ways that range from "I don't know what Trump said" to "Trump totally might have said it based on nothing more than the entirety of his public comments about the military, but I'm too chickenshit to weigh in definitively one way or the other."