The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

ambassadorship. Kelly said, “Yes, that was outrageous.

Trump really wanted Putin to visit Washington, which the Russians had no intention of doing, and we had been skirmishing over Helsinki and Vienna as possible meeting venues. Russia pushed Vienna, and we pushed Helsinki, but it turned out Trump didn’t favor Helsinki. “Isn’t Finland kind of a satellite of Russia?” he asked. (Later that same morning, Trump asked Kelly if Finland was part of Russia.)

during an unrelated meeting on August 15, Venezuela came up, and Trump said to me emphatically, “Get it done,” meaning get rid of the Maduro regime. “This is the fifth time I’ve asked for it,” he continued. I described the thinking we were doing, in a meeting now slimmed down to just Kelly and me, but Trump insisted he wanted military options for Venezuela and then keep it because “it’s really part of the United States.”

State reversed Obama’s absurd conclusion that Cuban baseball was somehow independent of its government, thus in turn allowing Treasury to revoke the license allowing Major League Baseball to traffic in Cuban players. This action didn’t endear us to the owners, but they were sadly mistaken if they didn’t grasp that their participation in professional baseball’s scheme meant they were sleeping with the enemy.

pre-clearance review, notwithstanding our conviction