The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

In the midst of these difficulties, we received one piece of extraordinarily good news, on April 12, when the International Criminal Court’s “pretrial chamber” handed down a thirty-two-page opinion rejecting its prosecutor’s request to open an investigation into the conduct of US military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan. I spoke several times with former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, our Ambassador to the Netherlands, where the court was located, in the Hague, and found him nearly as surprised as I that we had succeeded in stopping this miscarriage of justice. I had long opposed the court,3 and I had given a speech early in my tenure to the Federalist Society in Washington about why the Administration rejected it as a matter of principle, and the steps we were prepared to take against the court if it presumed to target American citizens.4 I called Trump at nine fifteen a.m. to tell him about the decision, and he said, “Put out something powerful,” which I was delighted to do.