The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

By then, I was a private citizen. At about two fifteen p.m. on Monday, September 9, Trump called me down to the Oval, where we met alone. He complained about press coverage on Afghanistan and the cancellation of the Camp David meeting with the Taliban, not to mention the overwhelmingly negative reaction, certainly among Republicans, both to the deal and the invitation of Taliban to Camp David. Of course, most of the negative reaction he had brought on himself by his ill-advised tweets. Perhaps surprisingly, nothing had leaked before the tweets, but they blew the lid off the story. He was furious he was being portrayed as a fool, not that he put it that way. He said, “A lot of people don’t like you. They say you’re a leaker and not a team player.” I wasn’t about to let that go. I said I’d been subject to a campaign of negative leaks against me over the past several months, which I would be happy to describe in detail, and I’d also be happy to tell him who I thought the leaks were coming from. (Mostly, I believed the leaks were being directed by Pompeo and Mulvaney.) As for the claim I was a leaker, I urged him to look for all the favorable stories about me in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, which often revealed who was doing the leaking, and he would find none. Trump asked specifically about the meeting with the Taliban, and I reminded him I had said merely the Taliban should go through a powerful magnetometer. What I had said was that I wouldn’t hav...