The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  I left Kiev confident Zelensky understood the magnitude of the task facing him, at home and abroad, as did his incoming team. These were people we could work with, so long as we didn’t get lost in the fever swamps, which remained to be seen. 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.17

  On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18

  Flying from Minsk to Warsaw, I called Pompeo to brief him on the trip to Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus. I relayed specifically what Taylor had told me candidly in Kiev: he had left the private sector to rejoin the government temporarily as Chargé in a country where he had been Ambassador (a rare occurrence, if it ever happened before), because of how strongly he supported a close Ukraine-US relationship. If we took an indifferent or hostile approach toward Ukraine, he said, “I’m not your guy here,” which Pompeo confirmed Taylor had also said explicitly before taking on the post in the spring, after Yovanovitch was removed. Neither Pompeo nor I had any doubt that Taylor’s resignation was nearly certain if the military assistance did not go through.

  I asked whether it might be possible to get a decision on the security funds before Trump left for Warsaw. Pompeo thought it was, noting also that he would have another chance on Air Force One, which was leaving Andrews Friday night and arriving in Warsaw Saturday morning. The meeting with Zelensky was scheduled for Sunday morning, so there was also at least some time in Warsaw. Jim Inhofe, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was trying to reach me, and Pompeo and I reviewed the several Hill options we had been considering and discussing quietly to get some relief from the September 30 deadline. There might be ways to buy more time, usually impossible at a fiscal year’s end but doable here in a variety of ways because of the overwhelming bipartisan support for security assistance to Ukraine.

  That night, we learned Trump would not travel to Poland because of Hurricane Dorian’s approach to Florida, and that Pence would come instead, not landing until Sunday morning. Both Pompeo and Esper dropped off the trip, and the Warsaw schedule was thrown into disarray because Pence would arrive twenty-four hours later than planned for Trump. In particular, the Zelensky meeting would now have to be after the ceremony for the eightieth anniversary of the Nazi attack on Poland rather than before. All of that could be done, but it obviously meant that a Trump decision on Ukraine military aid had again been pushed to the back burner. Time was now racing away from us.

  On Friday evening Warsaw time, August 30, I participated from Warsaw via videoconference in an NSC meeting on Afghanistan with Trump and most others in the Sit Room. As I have described, so consuming was the Afghanistan discussion that Trump was leaving the room before I realized the meeting was breaking up. I all but yelled at the screen, “Wait, what about Ukraine?” and everyone sat back down. Trump said, “I don’t give a shit about NATO. I am ready to say, ‘If you don’t pay, we won’t defend them.’ I want the three hundred million dollars [he meant two hundred fifty million dollars, one piece of the assistance earmarked for Ukraine] to be paid through NATO.” Of course, none of that was physically possible, reflecting Trump’s continued lack of understanding of what these funds were and how they came to be earmarked, but there was nothing new there. “Ukraine is a wall between us and Russia,” he said, meaning, I think, a barrier to closer Moscow-Washington relations. He then said to Pence, “Call [NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg and have him have NATO pay. Say ‘The President is for you, but the money should come from NATO,’ ” which still didn’t make any sense. “Wait until the NATO meeting in December,” Trump said, implying, at least in my mind, that he was going to announce we were withdrawing.

  This was not good news, although Kupperman told me Senator Inhofe spoke with Trump for nearly thirty minutes after the NSC meeting, working on the security assistance question. Trump finally said to him, “Pence will soften my message,” whatever that meant. Senator Ron Johnson told me a few days later he had also spoken to Trump, and made the political point that support for Ukraine in Congress was nearly unanimous. He was not sure he had moved Trump, but I knew the number of House and Senate members preparing to call or meet with Trump was growing rapidly. Raw politics might yet do better with Trump than substantive arguments. In any case the meeting ended inconclusively.

  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.

  Time was tight before we had to leave for Pilsudski Square, the venue for the ceremony, and where Pope John Paul II had given the famous 1979 mass that many Poles believe marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. We didn’t return to the hotel until two thirty, well behind schedule because of the complex logistics for all the national leaders attending. In another opportunity to brief Pence, without Sondland’s being present, I explained I had to leave the Zelensky meeting (which began at three thirty, almost an hour late) no later than three forty-five. Pence and I concentrated on the security assistance issue, and he acknowledged we still didn’t have a good answer to give. Once Zelensky arrived, the press mob stumbled in, asking questions on the subject, which Pence ducked as adroitly as possible. The press left, as did I simultaneously so my plane didn’t lose its takeoff slot at W
arsaw’s crowded airport. I didn’t hear until later, therefore, when Morrison called, that Zelensky had homed in on the security package as soon as the press departed. Pence danced around it, but the lack of a “yes, it’s definitely coming” statement was impossible to hide. Fortunately, Sondland did not raise the Giuliani issues during the meeting with Zelensky, as he had pressed us to do. Afterward, however, said Morrison, 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.

  After a quiet Labor Day, I spent Tuesday at the White House, catching up. When Haspel and the intelligence briefing team arrived before seeing Trump, she said, “You can’t do that again!” “What?” I asked. “Go away for a week,” she said, and we all laughed. On September 4, I spoke to Pence, still in Europe at Trump’s Doonbeg, Ireland, golf resort, which had become the latest scandal of the day. Pence was impressed with Zelensky, and so informed Trump, concluding, “My recommendation and the consensus recommendation of your advisors is that we move forward with the two hundred fifty million dollars.” 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

  Over the weekend, Zelensky’s prisoner swap with Russia proceeded, a positive event in its own right, and which Trump had seemingly indicated might be enough to get him to release the security assistance. Pompeo and I discussed this on the morning of September 9, and Esper and I spoke about it by phone later that day, in both cases continuing to press for legislative relief to buy more time. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump decided to release the Ukraine money.21

  * * *

  By then, I was a private citizen. At about two fifteen p.m. on Monday, September 9, Trump called me down to the Oval, where we met alone. He complained about press coverage on Afghanistan and the cancellation of the Camp David meeting with the Taliban, not to mention the overwhelmingly negative reaction, certainly among Republicans, both to the deal and the invitation of Taliban to Camp David. Of course, most of the negative reaction he had brought on himself by his ill-advised tweets. Perhaps surprisingly, nothing had leaked before the tweets, but they blew the lid off the story. He was furious he was being portrayed as a fool, not that he put it that way. He said, “A lot of people don’t like you. They say you’re a leaker and not a team player.” I wasn’t about to let that go. I said I’d been subject to a campaign of negative leaks against me over the past several months, which I would be happy to describe in detail, and I’d also be happy to tell him who I thought the leaks were coming from. (Mostly, I believed the leaks were being directed by Pompeo and Mulvaney.)

  As for the claim I was a leaker, I urged him to look for all the favorable stories about me in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, which often revealed who was doing the leaking, and he would find none. Trump asked specifically about the meeting with the Taliban, and I reminded him I had said merely the Taliban should go through a powerful magnetometer. What I had said was that I wouldn’t have signed the State Department’s deal, and Trump pointed his finger at me and said, “I agree.” Then he was off again, saying, “You have your own airplane,” which I explained briefly I did not. I flew on military aircraft on all official trips, following precisely the same policy that governed my predecessors and many other senior officials involved in national security. I didn’t write these rules; I followed them. I knew this specifically was a Mulvaney complaint, the source of a lot of this nonsense. “You’ve got all your own people back there [on the National Security Council staff],” said Trump, another Mulvaney complaint. Of course, Trump’s usual complaint was that the NSC staff included too many members of the “deep state.”

  At that point, I rose from the chair in front of the Resolute desk, saying, “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave.” Trump said, “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

  That was my last conversation with Trump. I left the Oval at about two thirty and returned to my office. I told Kupperman and Tinsley about the conversation and said that was it as far as I was concerned. I gave my short resignation letter, written several months before, to Christine Samuelian, my assistant, to put on White House letterhead. I said I was going home to sleep on it overnight, but I was ready to resign the next day. In light of the subsequent controversy, I should note that on Tuesday, Kupperman told me that Dan Walsh, one of Mulvaney’s deputies, had called him late Monday, returning with Trump on Air Force One from a North Carolina political rally Trump had departed for right after speaking with me. Trump was still spun up about my use of military aircraft, which Walsh had tried to explain to him unsuccessfully, and said to Walsh, “You tell him he’s not getting another plane unless I specifically approve it.” This comment from Trump demonstrates that late on Monday he still thought I’d be around making requests for military planes after seeing him on Tuesday.

  On Tuesday, September 10, in the morning, I came in at my regular early hour, fulfilled a few remaining obligations, and then left to be at home when the firestorm hit. I asked Christine to take the letter down to the Outer Oval and deliver copies to Pence, Mulvaney, Cipollone, and Grisham at 11:30 a.m. I am confident Trump did not expect it, tweeting at about 11:50 to get his story out first. I should have struck preemptively—there’s a lesson in that—but I was content to counter-tweet with the facts. I know how it actually ended. And with that, I was a free man again.

  CHAPTER 15 EPILOGUE

  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.

  Nonetheless, as the previous chapter demonstrates, 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.

  Neither I nor my attorneys, an outstanding team led by Chuck Cooper, an old friend and colleague from the Department of Justice during the Reagan Administration, were speaking to the press, for good and sufficient reasons. What little sense of complexity and intellectual rigor political debate in America still retains was quickly lost in the impeachment struggle, and trying to explain my views didn’t pass my cost-benefit analys
is of time and effort expended, given the predictable results. Many other participants in the impeachment conflict, however, had their own agendas, often more vigorously pursued in the media than in the real world. Inevitably, therefore, press coverage was often badly wrong, reflecting both the not-so-hidden agendas of many other players, and the usual media bias, laziness, lack of education and professionalism, and short attention span. I felt then, and feel now, no obligation to correct reporters’ mistakes about me piecemeal; if I did that, I would barely have time for anything else. I believed that I would have my say in due course (one of the few comments I did make to the press, on several occasions), and I was content to bide my time. I believed throughout, as the line in Hamilton goes, that “I am not throwing away my shot,” especially not to please the howling press, the howling advocates of impeachment, or Trump’s howling defenders.