The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Trump said, “We do a lot for Ukraine, much more than the European countries, who should do more, like Germany. They just talk. When I talk to Angela Merkel, she talks about Ukraine but doesn’t do anything. The US has been very, very good to Ukraine, but it’s not reciprocal because of things that have happened [Giuliani’s conspiracy theories].” Zelensky answered, “You are absolutely right, one thousand percent. I did talk and meet with Merkel and Macron, and they’re not doing as much as they should do. They are not enforcing sanctions [against Russia]. The EU should be our biggest partner, but the US is, and I’m very grateful to you for that. The US is doing much more on sanctions.” He then thanked the US for its defense assistance, saying he wanted to buy more Javelins. Trump turned to the real issue: “I would like you to do us a favor, because our country has been through a lot, and Ukraine knows a lot about it. Find out about CrowdStrike [a cyber company the DNC used], the server, people say Ukraine has it. I would like our Attorney General to call you and get to the bottom of it. The whole thing ended yesterday with Mueller [his televised House hearing12]: impotent, incompetent. I hope you can get to the bottom of it.” Zelensky answered: “This is very important for me as President, and we are ready for future cooperation, and to open a new page in our relations. I just recalled the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, and he will be replaced to make sure our two c...

“You had a good prosecutor. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. If he could call you along with the Attorney General, and if you could speak to him, it would be great. The former Ambassador from the United States was bad news. The people she was dealing with were bad news. There is lots of talk about Biden’s son stopping the prosecution [against those formulating and executing the Russia collusion operation]. He went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution. It sounds horrible.” Zelensky said, “Since we have an absolute majority in parliament, the next Prosecutor General will be one hundred percent my candidate. He will start in September. He will look at the company. The investigation is to restore honesty. If you have any additional information to provide us, please do so. With regard to the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch, I am glad you told me she was bad. I agree one hundred percent. Her attitude toward me was far from the best. She would not accept me as President.”

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...

Esper, Pompeo, and I continued exchanging thoughts about how to persuade Trump to release the security assistance before September 30. We could have confronted Trump directly, trying to refute the Giuliani theories and arguing that it was impermissible to leverage US government authorities for personal political gain. We could have, and we almost certainly would have failed, and perhaps have also created one or more vacancies among Trump’s senior advisors. The correct course was to separate the Ukraine security assistance from the Ukraine fantasies, get the military aid approved, and deal with Giuliani and the fantasies later. I thought, in fact, I had already initiated the second, Giuliani-related track, with the White House Counsel’s office and subsequently with Bill Barr. There was also no point in encouraging more fruitless grinding at lower levels of the bureaucracy. None of that would have any impact on Trump’s decision-making and could only risk press stories that would dig Trump in even more deeply against releasing the aid. That, at least, was my assessment at the time, and one that I believe Esper and Pompeo agreed with.

The Office of Management and Budget had, of course, by then entered the picture, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, but we suspected more likely because Trump used Mulvaney to put a stop to any efforts by the State or Defense Departments to move funds they respectively supervised. The budget office was also trying to rescind more than $4 billion of foreign economic assistance (which affected only the State Department, not the Pentagon), an annual exercise. As in 2018, the budgeteers ultimately backed down, mostly because there would have been open warfare with Congress had Trump decided to proceed with rescission. Mulvaney and others later argued that the dispute over Ukraine’s security assistance was related to rescinding the economic assistance, but this was entirely an ex post facto rationalization.

The next morning, August 20, I took Trump’s temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over. That could take years, so it didn’t sound like there was much of a prospect that the military aid would proceed. Nonetheless, with time running out, I said that Esper, Pompeo, and I would like to see Trump about the issue later in the week, which he accepted.

Khomchak was also an enthusiastic supporter of US military assistance: He stressed the need to change the culture of Ukraine’s military, including through providing English-language training and other reforms to break free from Moscow’s influence. He was also very worried about Russian efforts to build up military strength in the region, which would be a direct threat to both Poland and Ukraine.

The Zelensky meeting began at twelve thirty p.m. and lasted until about two. On the Ukrainian side were basically all those who had participated in the earlier meetings. Bill Taylor, NSC officials, and several embassy officers comprised the US side. Zelensky was impressive throughout, very much in command of the issues. He started by thanking us for keeping our Crimea sanctions in place and our continued nonrecognition of Russia’s purported annexation. I thought: If only he knew how close we were to giving all that away! We discussed Crimea, the Donbas, the failing Normandy Format peace process, and his desire to get the US and the UK more active in resolving the Russia-Ukraine dispute. Domestically, Zelensky said the fight against corruption, the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, was his highest priority. His “Servant of the People Party,” named after his TV show, had 254 Rada members, and he said that when the new session opened, they would introduce 254 reform bills, one for each party member to shepherd through. Zelensky emphasized that the time for promises alone was over, and it was now time to implement the promises he had campaigned on.

Zelensky had very specific ideas for a cease-fire, starting at one particular town and then expanding it. There would be no diplomatic games from him, he said, but Ukraine needed to see reciprocal steps from Russia: he wanted to resolve the issue, not let it drag out for years. We also discussed the tricky issue of what would happen if the Donbas were resolved but not Crimea. No one, including the US, had a way around this dilemma, but Zelensky stressed that the West as a whole had to keep sanctions tied to the Crimea problem, not just ending the Donbas war. After discussing Belarus and Moldova, and their common problems with Russia and corruption, we concluded. There was no discussion of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or anything in Giuliani land. If this didn’t demonstrate what America’s real interests were, and what Zelensky should raise with Trump in Warsaw, I didn’t know how else to do it.

Taylor, who had been in all my meetings except my brief Ryaboshapka one-on-one, spoke to me alone before I left for the airport, asking what he should do about the swirling Giuliani issues. I sympathized with his plight, so I urged him to write a “first-person cable” to Pompeo telling him what he knew. “First-person cables” are rare, direct messages from a Chief of Mission straight to the Secretary of State, reserved for extraordinary circumstances, which we obviously had here. Besides, it was past time to get Pompeo more actively into the fray. Taylor’s subsequent congressional testimony made him one of the most important witnesses in the House impeachment investigation.

Pence called Saturday night while flying to Warsaw to discuss Trump: “I thought I heard him say that he knew it was the end of the fiscal year, and there had been no prior notification [to Ukraine] we would want to cut the money off, but he had real concerns. I think I know the President well enough that he might be saying, ‘Let’s do this, but get our allies to do more in the future.’ ” I hoped that was the message he would deliver in Warsaw. Neither of us, however, yet knew. Pence landed in Warsaw on Sunday morning, slightly ahead of schedule, just before ten a.m. To my surprise, Sondland had flown on Air Force Two and also managed to crash the briefing the VP’s staff had arranged, notwithstanding the advance team’s efforts to keep him out. Sondland later testified that he had been “invited at the very last minute.” He invited himself over near-physical efforts by the VP’s advance people to keep him out. At the briefing, I told Pence in abbreviated form about my trip to the three eastern European countries, especially my meeting with Zelensky and the other Ukrainians in Kiev. Subsequently, Sondland testified he had said in this same meeting that aid to Ukraine was being tied to the “investigations” Trump and Giuliani wanted, and that his comment had been “duly noted” by Pence. I don’t recall Sondland’s saying anything at that meeting.

Sondland had grabbed one of Zelensky’s advisors, Andriy Yermak, who handled “US affairs” and who had previously met with Giuliani. Morrison was not fully aware of what Sondland and Yermak had discussed, but I doubted it had to do with Crimea or the Donbas, let alone the implications of the demise of the INF Treaty. Morrison told me in a subsequent conversation that Sondland had raised the Giuliani issues with Yermak.

Pence also pressed Trump to meet Zelensky at the UN General Assembly and said that “just between us girls,” he thought Trump was looking for a news peg to make what we hoped was the right decision. “Zelensky didn’t quite close the argument [in their meeting], so I closed it for him,” said Pence, which sounded positive. In the meantime, the press was beginning to sniff out the connection between withholding military assistance for Ukraine and Trump’s obsession with the 2016 and 2020 elections in the persons of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.19 Bipartisan Hill opposition to withholding the aid continued to rise (which, all else failing, I hoped would produce the right result). It was not until the end of September, however, that the media began to appreciate what had been happening since well before the July 25 call.20

When I resigned as National Security Advisor on September 10, 2019, no one was predicting the subsequent Trump impeachment saga. I was not then aware of the now famous whistleblower’s complaint, nor of its handling within the Executive Branch, but that complaint and the publicity it subsequently received transformed the Washington political landscape in completely unforeseen ways. I have no idea who the whistleblower is.

I knew more than I wanted to about Trump’s handling of Ukraine affairs, and while the nation as a whole concentrated on the unfolding events relating to impeachment, I concentrated on deciding what my personal and constitutional responsibilities were regarding that information. Whether Trump’s conduct rose to the level of an impeachable offense, I had found it deeply disturbing, which is why I had reported it to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his staff and Attorney General Bill Barr, and why Pompeo, Mnuchin, and I had worried over it in our own conversations. But the importance of maintaining the President’s constitutional authority, and what Hamilton called “energy in the Executive” were no small matters either. In the subsequent partisan Armageddon, virtue signalers on both sides of the battle were quick to tell the world how easy the choices were. I didn’t see it that way.

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...

First, it narrowed the scope of the impeachment inquiry dramatically and provided no opportunity to explore Trump’s ham-handed involvement in other matters—criminal and civil, international and domestic—that should not properly be subject to manipulation by a President for personal reasons (political, economic, or any other). This is not to say that I have any doubts about a President’s Article II authority over the Department of Justice. But it does mean that a President’s Constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” means that the laws must be applied evenhandedly. A President may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest. Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests (whether political or economic), but on the broader pattern of his behavior—including his pressure campaigns involving Halkbank, ZTE, and Huawei among others—there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been perpetrated. In fact, I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.

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Second, rushed proceedings, combined with the hysterical mood of many impeachment advocates, which brooked no dissent from the proposition that Trump had to be removed from office by any means available, meant that developing a truly accurate record—at a minimum, a full record—was not an option House Democrats wanted to pursue. In turn, this resulted, quite literally, in driving away House Republicans who might have been inclined at least to consider articles of impeachment involving broader aspects of Trump’s conduct. From the very earliest days of the House proceedings, that meant that the entire affair would be bitterly partisan, which is exactly what it turned out to be. This was particularly true of the second article of impeachment (“obstruction of Congress”), which was frivolous on its face. And what was true of the House was equally true in the Senate, meaning that lines were drawn on party grounds, making Trump’s acquittal in the Senate a certainty even before the final House votes to impeach. This scenario was not inevitable ab initio, but it was made so by the conscious decisions of the House impeachment advocates.

malpractice pure and simple. And that’s how I saw it almost from the outset. Of course, it wasn’t long before former Deputy National Security Advisor Charlie Kupperman and I received inquiries from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about whether we would testify. As did the attorneys for other witnesses who testified before the committee. Cooper asked for subpoenas, and one was duly issued for Kupperman. Immediately, the White House informed Kupperman that the President had ordered that he invoke “testimonial immunity,” a more stringent instruction than other witnesses subpoenaed by the intelligence committee had theretofore received, and that he not even appear at the noticed deposition. On Kupperman’s behalf, Cooper promptly filed a lawsuit seeking judicial guidance on which of the two contradictory commands to follow, exactly what I would have done had I been in Kupperman’s place. The various plea...

“During the present impeachment controversy, I have tried to meet my obligations both as a citizen and as former National Security Advisor. My colleague, Dr. Charles Kupperman, faced with a House committee subpoena on the one hand, and a Presidential directive not to testify on the other, sought final resolution of this Constitutional conflict from the Federal judiciary. After my counsel informed the House committee that I too would seek judicial resolution of these Constitutional issues, the committee chose not to subpoena me. Nevertheless, I publicly resolved to be guided by the outcome of Dr. Kupperman’s case. “But both the President and the House of Representatives opposed his effort on jurisdictional grounds, and each other on the merits. The House committee went so far as to withdraw its subpoena to Dr. Kupperman in a deliberate attempt to moot the case and deprive the court of jurisdiction. Judge Richard Leon, in a carefully reasoned opinion on December 30, held Dr. Kupperman’s case to be moot, and therefore did not reach the separation-of-powers issues. “The House has concluded its Constitutional responsibility by adopting Articles of Impeachment related to the Ukraine matter. It now falls to the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to try impeachments, and it does not appear possible that a final judicial resolution of the still-unanswered Constitutional questions can be obtained before the Senate acts. “Accordingly, since my testimony is once again at ...

Senate, of course, declined to hear any witnesses, and went on to acquit Trump on the two articles of impeachment the House had adopted. Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome.

Impeachment, of course, is, for the most part, only a theoretical guardrail constitutionally. The real guardrail is elections, which Trump faces in November 2020. Should he win, the Twenty-Second Amendment precludes (and should continue to preclude) any further electoral constraint on Trump. While liberals and Democrats focus on impeachment, conservatives and Republicans should worry about the removal of the political guardrail of Trump having to face reelection. As this memoir demonstrates, many of Trump’s national security decisions hinged more on political than on philosophy, strategy or foreign policy and defense rationales. More widely, faced with the coronavirus crisis, Trump said, “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”2 He threatened to adjourn Congress, wrongly citing a constitutional provision that has never been used.3 No conservative who has read the Constitution could be anything but astonished at these assertions.

“I believe former senior officials have virtually an obligation to explain what they did while in government.… It is jarringly apparent to government veterans that those who have never been ‘inside’ find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand what goes on and why. Press accounts and ‘instant histories’ are far too often lacking in insight and understanding of the government in operation. Accordingly, memoirs are critical to parting the curtain for the uninitiated, as Gates does.

“Indeed, if Gates is subject to criticism on timing, it is precisely that he did not publish before the 2012 election, where exposing Barack Obama’s views on Afghanistan and his lack of interest in the global war on terrorism could have been significant. For example, voters could well have benefited from knowing what Gates was thinking during a March 2011 National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room, listening to the Commander in Chief: ‘The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him it’s all about getting out.’ “The harder, more important question is whether Gates violated the implicit confidences of the president and other senior colleagues. In some respects, this criticism parallels the justification for ‘executive privilege,’ namely, that the president must be able to receive candid advice from his subordinates, and that such candor is simply impossible if people expect to read about it thereafter. Since the integrity of Executive Branch decision-making is under siege from virtually every direction imaginable, it is no small matter if it is vulnerable from the very people directly advising the president. “But the executive-privilege analogy is only superficially accurate. All histories pose a threat to executive privilege, and insiders have been leaking internal administration battles since Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson propagandized aga...