The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

In the afternoon, we were to unveil the sanctions in the White House briefing room, but I got diverted to the Oval first. Trump was very happy with how “the Venezuela thing” was playing in the press. He asked if we should send five thousand troops to Colombia in case they might be needed, which I duly noted on my yellow legal pad, saying I would check with the Pentagon. “Go have fun with the press,” Trump said, which we did, when my note, picked up by cameras, produced endless speculation. (A few weeks later, Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Trujillo brought me a pack of legal pads like the one I had in the briefing room, so I didn’t run out.) Substantively, we believed that the oil sanctions were a major blow to Maduro’s regime, and many asserted that it was now just a matter of time before he fell. Their optimism was high, fueled in substantial part because they believed Maduro loyalists like Diosdado Cabello24 and others were sending both their financial assets and their families abroad for safety, hardly a vote of confidence in the regime.