The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The next day, the entire senior White House communications team conferred with Trump in the Oval. Still surprised at the negative reaction, he had reviewed the press-conference transcript and decided he had misspoken. In the line where he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be,” meaning, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” he had meant to say “would not be [Russia],” thereby reversing the sentence’s meaning. Trump was renowned for never backing away from something he said, in fact usually digging in when challenged, so this was a surprising turnaround. Of course, that change alone did not eliminate the problem of his other statements accepting moral equivalence between Putin’s view and our own intelligence community’s view. But for the press office people, Trump’s making any kind of corrective statement was progress. Stephen Miller drafted prepared remarks, which Trump delivered in the early afternoon.