The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

These were, to me, the key remarks in the July 25 call that later raised so much attention, deservedly so, whether impeachable, criminal, or otherwise. When, in 1992, Bush 41 supporters suggested he ask foreign governments to help out in his failing campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush and Jim Baker completely rejected the idea.13 Trump did the precise opposite. The next week, the State and Defense Departments pressed to transfer nearly $400 million of security assistance to Ukraine, calling for high-level meetings, as bureaucracies do reflexively. Of course, the bureaucrats didn’t know that Pompeo, Esper, and I had been discussing this subject quietly for some time, making efforts with Trump to free up the money, all of which had failed. (By the time I resigned, we calculated that, individually and in various combinations, we had talked to Trump between eight and ten times to get the money released.) If the bureaucrats believed that a Principals Committee would change Trump’s mind, they hadn’t been paying much attention for two and a half years. I told Tim Morrison, Fiona Hill’s successor, to have the State and Defense Departments stop focusing on meetings, but I wanted to have the funds ready in case Trump did agree to release them. For that to happen, we needed to prepare the necessary paperwork, to be sure we could obligate the security assistance before the fiscal year’s looming September 30 end. Under long-standing budget rules applicable to the legislation earmarking...