The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

My substantive views on the impeachment process were decidedly mixed. 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. Such an approach was not serious constitutionally. If Trump deserved impeachment and conviction, the American public deserved a serious and thorough effort to justify the extraordinary punishment of removing an elected president from office. That did not happen. The Democrats’ perceived imperatives posed by the electoral calendar may have raised hard political questions and difficult logistical problems for impeachment advocates, but that was their own fault. Their self-imposed scheduling limitations hardly rose to a constitutional level at all, let alone one equivalent to impeaching a President, one of Congress’s gravest Constitutional responsibilities. Neither did scheduling issues justify the subsequent tactical decisions by the impeachment proponents, such as not pursuing subpoena enforcement actions in court, or otherwise building not just an “adequate” evidentiary record, but a compelling one. Indeed, in some senses it was a mirror image of what impeachment advocates were accusing Tr...