The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.

Hobbes’s description of human existence as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” accurately described life in the White House,

My goal was not to get a membership card but to get a driver’s license.

“When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.”

The President used “very rough language,” said Kelly, which was true, “and of course, he’s entitled to do that,” also true. Trump despised both Bush Presidents and their Administrations, leading me to wonder if he had missed my almost ten years of service in those presidencies. And Trump changed his mind constantly.

Leaving would risk losing even the limited gains achieved under Barack Obama’s misbegotten Syria-Iraq policies, thereby exacerbating the dangers his approach fostered.

Of course, Trump didn’t help by not being clear about what he wanted, jumping randomly from one question to another, and generally frustrating efforts to have a coherent discussion about the consequences of making one choice rather than another.

Trump believed that acknowledging Russia’s meddling in US politics, or in that of many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, would implicitly acknowledge that he had colluded with Russia in his 2016 campaign.

Kelly and I, sitting next to each other in the audience, were almost frozen to our seats by Trump’s answer. It was obvious that major corrective action would be needed because of this self-inflicted wound,

Unable to criticize the adequacy of the overall effort, the media therefore turned to saying Trump was following one policy and we were following another.19 Unfortunately, there was something to that, as Trump repeatedly objected to criticizing Russia and pressed us not to be so critical of Russia publicly.

Trump seemed to think that criticizing the policies and actions of foreign governments made it harder for him to have good personal relations with their leaders.

None of the three prior Republican Administrations in which I served had seen anything approaching this extent and manner of senior-level turnover.

As was often the case, Trump had truth mixed with misunderstanding and malice.

Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.

McGahn had often joked to me, “We’re all only one tweet away,”

As Kelly confirmed to me later, tensions between Trump and McGahn had become unsustainable because of McGahn’s (truthful) testimony to, and cooperation with, Mueller’s investigation. Even though Trump’s outside attorneys had approved McGahn’s role, they were all reportedly surprised by just how candid he was.

Kelly said, “What if we have a real crisis like 9/11 with the way he makes decisions?”

“You know, most of this I can’t do until after the election,”

US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next. One highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on Presidents should be repealed for him. I was aware of no such chatter. Knowing Xi was effectively “President for life” in China, Trump was trying to compete with him. Later in the dinner, Xi said the US had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.

As long as Trump is President, and probably thereafter, he will search for a lawyer willing to prosecute Kerry.

At this meeting, I learned Giuliani was the source of the stories about Yovanovitch,

Pompeo said he had spoken with Giuliani before, and there were no facts supporting any of his allegations, although Pompeo didn’t doubt that, like 90 percent of the Foreign Service, Yovanovitch probably voted for Clinton. He said she was trying to reduce corruption in Ukraine and may well have been going after some of Giuliani’s clients. Pompeo said he would call Giuliani again and then speak to Trump.

also wanted to brief him on Trump’s penchant to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked, such as the criminal cases of Halkbank, ZTE, potentially Huawei, and who knew what else. Barr said he was very worried about the appearances Trump was creating, especially his remarks on Halkbank to Erdogan in Buenos Aires at the G20 meeting, what he said to Xi Jinping on ZTE, and other exchanges. I had had essentially this same conversation with Cipollone and Eisenberg for about an hour on January 22, shortly after Cipollone replaced McGahn on December 10, 2018. At that time, we discussed Halkbank, ZTE, a Turkish agent Israel had arrested (and Trump had gotten released during his July stay at Turnberry in calls with Netanyahu),

The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept. Moreover, leniency for Chinese firms violating US sanctions, cheating our companies, or endangering our telecom infrastructure could only be described as appeasing our adversaries, totally contrary to our interests. Somewhere nearby was resignation territory, I said, which Pompeo agreed with. This didn’t yet require drafting a resignation letter, but warning lights were flashing.

Trump completely accepted Giuliani’s line that the “Russia collusion” narrative, invented by domestic US political adversaries, had been run through Ukraine. In other words, Trump was buying the idea that Ukraine was actually responsible for carrying out Moscow’s efforts to hack US elections. That clearly meant we wouldn’t be doing anything nice for Ukraine any time soon, no matter how much it might help us forestall further Russian advances there.

Senator Johnson told me several weeks later, regarding this Trump meeting, “I was pretty shocked by the President’s response.” I thought it sounded like just another day at the office.

The key point that I carried away from this conversation was that the Ukraine security assistance was at risk of being swallowed by the Ukraine fantasy conspiracy theories.

I told her to take this whole matter to the White House Counsel’s office; she quoted me accurately as saying, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.”

the linkage of the military assistance with the Giuliani fantasies was already baked in. The call was not the keystone for me, but simply another brick in the wall.

(By the time I resigned, we calculated that, individually and in various combinations, we had talked to Trump between eight and ten times to get the money released.)

We could have confronted Trump directly, trying to refute the Giuliani theories and arguing that it was impermissible to leverage US government authorities for personal political gain. We could have, and we almost certainly would have failed, and perhaps have also created one or more vacancies among Trump’s senior advisors.

The next morning, August 20, I took Trump’s temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over. That could take years, so it didn’t sound like there was much of a prospect that the military aid would proceed.

“Ukraine is a wall between us and Russia,” he said, meaning, I think, a barrier to closer Moscow-Washington relations.

Whether Trump’s conduct rose to the level of an impeachable offense, I had found it deeply disturbing,

In the subsequent partisan Armageddon, virtue signalers on both sides of the battle were quick to tell the world how easy the choices were. I didn’t see it that way.

They seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment in order to avoid interfering with the Democratic presidential nomination schedule than in completing a comprehensive investigation.

it narrowed the scope of the impeachment inquiry dramatically and provided no opportunity to explore Trump’s ham-handed involvement in other matters—criminal and civil, international and domestic—that should not properly be subject to manipulation by a President for personal reasons

A President may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest.

but on the broader pattern of his behavior—including his pressure campaigns involving Halkbank, ZTE, and Huawei among others—there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been perpetrated. In fact, I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.

many of Trump’s national security decisions hinged more on political than on philosophy, strategy or foreign policy and defense rationales.

In the Trump era, normal rules simply did not apply.

was prevented from conveying information that I thought was not properly classifiable, since it revealed information that can only be described as embarrassing to Trump,