The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

One week later, however, when I was in New York for the annual opening festivities of the UN General Assembly, Kelly called me to say the First Lady wanted Ricardel fired because her staff complained she had been uncooperative in preparing for FLOTUS’s upcoming trip to Africa. I found this stunning, and Kelly said it was “not clear how it got to this level.” He then characterized the First Lady’s staff as a bunch of catty, gossipy sorority types. No one said anything further to me, and I thought it had died away. Kelly was still in Washington because of “this Rosenstein thing,” meaning the stories about whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had ever proposed invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment against Trump, or that he wear a wire into the Oval to gather evidence to that end. This was also a first in presidential management history.