Former White House national security adviser John Bolton claims in his forthcoming memoir that President Trump committed multiple impeachable offenses that House Democrats never investigated, according to a copy of the book obtained by The New York Times.
In the memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton claims that not only did Trump explicitly condition aid to Ukraine on investigations involving former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he on several occasions signaled that he was willing to end criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked.”
Bolton writes that Trump’s pattern of behavior “looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” and that he scheduled a meeting to discuss it with Attorney General William Barr.
“Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different,” he writes.
Bolton accuses House Democrats of committing “impeachment malpractice” in limiting their inquiry to Ukraine, saying they should have probed the president’s willingness to interfere in investigations into companies such as Turkey’s Halkbank and China’s ZTE to curry favor with their respective leaders.