The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The issue of Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine percolated for a few days without a clear decision. Cipollone and Eisenberg came to see me on May 10, with Yovanovitch’s firing having received more media coverage (although the mainstream press showed little interest), and with Giuliani on his own generating a fair amount of attention. In a New York Times interview published in print that morning,8 he was quoted as saying, “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do… There’s nothing illegal about it… Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy—I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.” The three of us agreed Giuliani couldn’t be allowed to go to Ukraine, but the brouhaha also made it uncertain who from the Trump Administration could attend Zelensky’s inauguration, given the adverse publicity it might receive.