ABC News’ one-hour special featuring an exclusive interview with John Bolton won its timeslot with 6.1 million viewers and also topped the night in key demographics, the network said.
Based on fast affiliate numbers from Nielsen, ABC News said that Martha Raddatz’s heavily promoted interview delivered it best numbers for that timeslot in a year. The total audience in the period was up 56% from the previous week.
The network said that the interview was the night’s number one program among adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, the demographic most craved by advertisers.
Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, also appeared on Good Morning America on Monday for a live interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos, and he again had scathing criticism of Trump.
“The biggest fear I have is that his policymaking is so incoherent, so unfocused, so unstructured, so wrapped around his own personal political fortunes, that mistakes are being made that will have grave consequences for the national security of the United States,” Bolton said.
His book, The Room Where It Happened, is set to be released on Tuesday, but a number of journalists obtained advance copies last week and an excerpt ran in The Wall Street Journal.
A federal judge on Saturday rejected a Justice Department motion to halt the book’s release. But the judge, Royce Lamberth, criticized Bolton for not completing a required national security review process for the book.
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