The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Even Obama at least threatened attacking Iran, although the seriousness of his statements was open to question.

Restoring US credibility, and our utterly negligible deterrence against a nuclear-weapons-aspiring, theocratic-militarist rogue state, would have justified a lot more, but I didn’t feel I needed to make that argument.

Trump then set off into the Kerry/Logan Act riff, without which no meeting on Iran was really official.

In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do.

As Pompeo put it, “There are times when you just want to say, ‘You people figure it out.’ ”

“Always glad to talk to you, but why did you wake me in the middle of the night? Some jackass drives a car into the gate at our embassy? Nothing new in our world!” So much for that fantasy.

I suppose I really thought, “If he wants to put something out that foolish, who am I to object?”

was wounding to lay all this out in public, but there was no stopping Trump from revealing himself.

Dunford was not happy, saying Trump had basically called him “feckless” during the Sit Room meeting because he thought Dunford’s target options were “too small,” and then later called off the retaliation entirely because it was too large! Good point.

“I don’t like it. They didn’t kill any of our people. I want to stop it. Not a hundred fifty people.”

Iran’s formula was “maximum resistance to maximum pressure,” which was exactly the line Iran began to use publicly.

Most important, from the very outset of proceedings in the House of Representatives, advocates for impeaching Trump on the Ukraine issue were committing impeachment malpractice.

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.

If Trump deserved impeachment and conviction, the American public deserved a serious and thorough effort to justify the extraordinary punishment of r...

The irony could well be that Democrats will find themselves far more pleased substantively with a “legacy”-seeking Trump in his second term than conservatives and Republicans. Something to think about.

My reaction… my response? Game on.

James Baker told me shortly after his book, The Politics of Diplomacy,7 was published during the Clinton Administration, that he wished he had not submitted it for review.

government’s pre-clearance review process is riddled with constitutional deficiencies; the potential for obstruction, censorship, and abuse; and harmful to timely debate on critical public policy issues.