I Warned Trump He'd Be Impeached. Giuliani Was an Unguided Missile

In mid-August 2019, a senior official in the Justice Department's National Security Division had received a vague report from a lawyer in another agency that someone connected with the intelligence community was complaining that President Donald Trump had engaged in misconduct on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

This was the first I had heard about the call or any potential problem with it. Because we had no specifics about the substance of the phone conversation or the nature of the alleged impropriety, DOJ lawyers went over to the White House to review a summary transcript, which was the official record of the call.

Shortly after being briefed on the matter—and told that my name had been mentioned during the call—I went to review the transcript myself in Pat Cipollone's White House office. I thought parts of the president's conversation were unseemly and injudicious.

But I did not think the transcript showed a criminal offense. I agreed with Cipollone that the best course was to have the president publicly release the transcript as soon as possible.

Still, reading the transcript angered me. What bothered me wasn't just the harebrained gambit of pressing the Ukrainians to investigate Biden, but also that the president, in his usual imprecise and disjointed way, had carelessly lumped me together with his private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

By doing that, he had created the false impression that I was involved in efforts to get the Ukrainians to open investigations. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but I realized I would have my hands full straightening out the record with a hostile and suspicious press.

More than a month after the call, late in the afternoon on September 19, as hazy news about a whistleblower began to emerge publicly, I, along with Cipollone, went to visit the president in the Oval Office. Our purpose was to prevail upon him to quickly declassify and release the transcript and also the whistleblower's complaint.

I was still mad at the president's loose talk during the call, but my purpose in going to see him that day was not to criticize but to help deal with the gathering storm.

So far the advice Cipollone and I were giving to declassify and release the transcript and complaint was being ignored. These would eventually come out anyway, we argued, and releasing them quickly would help the White House get in front of the controversy and prevent Democrats in Congress and the press from spinning wild theories about what the president said.

Time was running out.

As the three of us sat down in front of the Resolute desk, the chorus continued to sing "Waltzing Matilda" in the Rose Garden outside.

"Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda / You'll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me."

"Mr. President," I started, "I think you need to get the Zelensky transcript out as soon as possible."

With that, President Trump reached out across his desk and pulled a copy toward him. "This whole thing is ridiculous," he said. "I went over the transcript, and there was nothing wrong with the conversation. It was perfect. A perfect conversation! Look at the transcript!"

"That is exactly the point, Mr. President," I said, "but as long as the content of the conversation is kept secret, people are free to characterize it any way they please, and everyone will think it's being kept secret to hide something."

He resisted. "We just can't make a president's conversations with a foreign leader public," the president said.

He argued that other foreign leaders wouldn't speak their minds with him on the phone if they thought the conversation would be made public. That would affect other presidents, too. He was right about that.

"But," I said, "we can deal with that by asking Zelensky's permission to release the transcript. To be frank, Mr. President, on the current course, if we don't release this transcript, I believe you will be impeached."

President Trump was a little taken aback by my emphatic prediction. "You think so?" he asked. "I really don't get it—the conversation was perfect!"

"Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong / 'You'll never catch me alive,' said he."

"Mr. President," I responded, "they had a lot riding on Mueller, and they're angry it didn't pan out. I think they are going to move very fast on this—a blitzkrieg. Unless and until you get the transcript out, you won't be able to defend yourself, and people will continue to assume the worst."

Cipollone and Rabbitt agreed strongly.

The president shook his head in disgust. "This is crazy. The conversation was perfect."

"Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong / 'You'll never catch me alive,' said he."

"Mr. President," I said, "I remember a story you told me about a friend of yours who was sued for harassing a woman, and he produced a videotape from a surveillance camera showing he wasn't near her and couldn't possibly have done it. He got the suit thrown out."

The president smiled and looked up. He remembered the story. "Well, the transcript is your videotape," I said. "It's not perfect, but it's good enough. It will show people what you really said. You need to get it out, and right away."

He paused and then looked silently at each of us. "I'll think about it," he said at last. The president seemed distracted, focused on other business, and unable to grasp the gravity of the situation.

We rose to our feet, and President Trump's attention snapped back to the next day's Australian state visit. He gestured to the French doors. "Go out through the Rose Garden. Melania is out there—she's putting on the finishing touches for the dinner. It's going to be so nice."

I arrived at the White House early the next morning to participate in the arrival ceremony for the Australian delegation. As my chief of staff and I stood on the South Lawn with other senior administration officials, Rudy Giuliani suddenly appeared out of the crowd.

Catching my eye, he walked directly toward me. I was reluctant to speak with him or be seen together, but I had nowhere to go. I shook his outstretched hand.

"Good morning, Mr. Mayor, it's good to see you," I lied.

Scores of cell phones popped up over the crowd to take photos of us shaking hands. Terrific, I thought to myself.

After the Australian state dinner that night—which was a tour de force—the president and much of his senior staff flew up to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. Cipollone and other White House officials continued to press for the transcript's release, but the president had not made a final decision.

While they were away in New York, the crisis worsened, with Democrats and the media speculating breathlessly about what, exactly, the president had said and done.

I continued making calls, including to Secretaries Pompeo and Mnuchin, who were with the President, arguing for prompt release of the transcript. Once they understood my position, they joined me in urging its release, but it was not until September 24 that the president finally agreed.

That delay gave Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi all the time she needed, and she authorized the impeachment inquiry the same day. The Democrats had a new line of attack on the president, and off they went.

In one sense, the call with Zelensky didn't matter. If it weren't that, it would have been something else. For the Democrats, the call was the nearest club with which to beat on Donald Trump. Even so, we—and the country—would have to deal with that phone call for the next several months.

In retrospect, earlier release of the transcript would probably not have changed the result. At the time, I was not aware of the extent to which Giuliani and others had been actively pressing the Ukrainians to launch investigations.

As the case for impeachment took shape, it came to rely more on those activities rather than the president's call with Zelensky. But there is no question that the push for impeachment gained momentum during those early days before the actual content of the president's conversation was known publicly. The vacuum of information aided that momentum.

Yet the transcript did end up helping the president: It was nothing close to the smoking gun of a quid pro quo, as the president's opponents had hoped for, and the president's ability to keep the focus on the transcript helped him blunt the attacks against him.

President Trump's impeachment was a self-inflicted wound. Much of the blame for getting the president impeached, in my view, must be laid at the feet of Rudy Giuliani.

The idea that the president's allies could debunk the collusion narrative by digging up evidence hidden in Ukraine—or that they could get the media to report on the Biden family's shameless behavior there—was a fantasy. The idea that goading the Ukrainians into investigating Hunter Biden would help the president's reelection bid was idiotic beyond belief.

The whole scheme was bound to backfire. And Giuliani's public grandstanding, and the unsavory figures he got involved with, ended up seriously undermining his credibility—not to mention tainting the president.

Rudy Giuliani saved New York City after 9/11 and should go down as probably the most consequential mayor of a big city in American history. But he will also go down as the man who helped President Trump get himself impeached—not once but, as it turned out, twice.

Predictably, when the transcript was released on September 25, the president's reference to me caused an avalanche of questions from the press about whether I or the department had been involved in pressing the Ukrainians to open investigations.

Fortunately, the answer was an emphatic no.

From the beginning of my tenure, I'd worried that Giuliani was an unguided missile, and Ukraine, a morass of misinformation. I was determined to steer the department clear of them as best I could and, if we had to deal with them at all, do so with the utmost caution.

William P. Barr is only the second person to have served twice as U.S. Attorney General, first under President George H.W. Bush and then President Donald Trump.

This is an excerpt from ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER by William P. Barr. Copyright © 2022 by William Pelham Barr. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The book is available in paperback from June 6, 2023.

All views expressed are the author's own.

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