WASHINGTON — Former Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, says in a brand new memoir that he regrets supporting the impeachment of President In
WASHINGTON — Former Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, says in a brand new memoir that he regrets supporting the impeachment of President Invoice Clinton, calling it a partisan assault that he now needs he had repudiated.
In his e-book “On the Home: A Washington Memoir,” a replica of which was obtained by The New York Instances, Mr. Boehner blames Consultant Tom DeLay of Texas, then the No. 2 Republican, for main a politically motivated marketing campaign in opposition to Mr. Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White Home intern.
The Republican-led Home voted to question Mr. Clinton on two counts in 1998. He was acquitted by the Senate.
“In my opinion, Republicans impeached him for one motive and one motive solely — as a result of it was strenuously beneficial to us by one Tom DeLay,” Mr. Boehner writes. “Tom believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these Home seats, can be an enormous win politically, and he satisfied sufficient of the membership and the G.O.P. base that this was true.
“I used to be on board on the time,” Mr. Boehner went on. “I received’t fake in any other case. However I remorse it now. I remorse that I didn’t struggle in opposition to it.”
Mr. Boehner’s memoir, whose cowl is {a photograph} of the previous speaker holding a glass of merlot, with a lit cigarette in an ashtray beside him — his pure habitat for many years — is stuffed with colourful tales from his time in Congress.
He pulls no punches for these he views as far-right bomb-throwers in his social gathering. (He saves a number of significantly forceful insults for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.) And he points a stinging denunciation of Donald J. Trump, saying that the now former president “incited that bloody revolt” by his supporters on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Celebration has been taken over by “whack jobs.”
Mr. Trump’s “refusal to just accept the results of the election not solely price Republicans the Senate however led to mob violence,” Mr. Boehner writes.
Mr. Boehner additionally particulars on the document a few of Capitol Hill’s most talked-about exchanges, together with the time that Consultant Don Younger, Republican of Alaska, pulled a knife on Mr. Boehner on the Home flooring after a essential speech about sweetheart tasks going to Alaska.
“Generally I can nonetheless really feel that factor in opposition to my throat,” Mr. Boehner writes. (The 2 would later patch issues up, and Mr. Boehner would function the most effective man in Mr. Younger’s wedding ceremony.)
Mr. Boehner additionally relays an encounter in his workplace wherein Mark Meadows, then a Republican consultant from North Carolina and a pacesetter of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, dropped to his knees to beg for forgiveness after a political coup try in opposition to Mr. Boehner failed.
“Not lengthy after the vote — a vote that like most of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts resulted in abject failure — I used to be instructed that Meadows wished to fulfill with me one-on-one,” Mr. Boehner recalled. “Earlier than I knew it, he had dropped off the sofa and was on his knees. Proper there on my rug. That was a primary. His palms got here collectively in entrance of him as if he had been about to hope. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he stated, or phrases to that impact.”
Mr. Boehner says he puzzled, within the second, what Mr. Meadows’s “elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made from their star organizer on the verge of tears, however that wasn’t my drawback.”
Mr. Boehner appears to be like down on the man who would later grow to be Mr. Trump’s White Home chief of employees.
“I took a protracted, gradual drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the strain cling there a bit of, you already know? I checked out my pack of Camels on the desk subsequent to me, then I seemed down at him, and requested (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.