WASHINGTON – Former Ohio Republican Speaker John Boehner says in a new memo that he regrets supporting President Bill Clinton’s accusation, calling it a partisan attack he now wants rejected.
In his book “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Boehner representative Tom DeLay of Texas, when Republican no. 2, for leading a politically motivated campaign against Mr. Clinton on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.
The Republican House voted in 1998 to remove Mr. Clinton on two charges. He was acquitted by the Senate.
“In my opinion, Republicans accused him for one reason or another because it was recommended to us by Tom DeLay,” he wrote. Boehner. ‘Tom believed that Clinton’s accusation would win us all these seats, be a political victory, and he convinced enough of the membership and the GOP base that this was true.
“I was on board then,” he said. Boehner went further. “I would not pretend otherwise. But I’m sorry about that now. I regret that I did not fight against it. ”
Boehner’s memoirs, the cover of which is a photograph of the former speaker holding a glass of merlot, with a cigarette in an ashtray next to him – his natural habitat for decades – are full of colorful stories from his time in Congress.
He does not strike blows at those he considers far-right bombers in his party. (He saves several particularly powerful insults for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.) And he issues a provocative accusation against Donald J. Trump, saying that the current president on January 6 “incited the bloody uprising” by his supporters at the Capitol and that the Republican Party was taken over by ‘sweeping’.
Mr. “Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the election has cost Republicans not only the Senate but also violence in the crowd,” Boehner wrote.
Mr. Boehner also details some of Capitol Hill’s most talked about exchanges, including the time Representative Don Young, an Alaska Republican, stabbed Mr. Boehner pulled on the house floor after a critical speech on sweet projects Alaska.
“Sometimes I still feel the thing against my throat,” he wrote. Boehner. (The two would fix things later, and Mr. Boehner would serve as the best man in Mr. Young’s wedding.)
Boehner also recounts a meeting in his office in which Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina and a leader of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, fell to his knees to beg forgiveness after a political coup attempt against Boehner. fail.
“Not long after the vote – a vote that, like many of the Freedom Caucus’ efforts, ended in a serious failure – I was told that Meadows wanted to meet me in person,” he said. Boehner remembers. ‘Before I knew it, he was falling off the couch and sitting on his knees. Right there on my mat. It was a first. His hands come together in front of him as if he is about to pray. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me, ‘he said, or words to it.’
Boehner says he asked himself at the moment what Mr. Meadows’ “elite and uncompromising group of Freedom Caucus warriors on the verge of tears would have made their star organizer tears, but that was not my problem.”
Mr. Boehner looks down on the man who would later become Trump’s White House Chief of Staff.
“I dragged my Camel cigarette long, slowly,” he writes. ‘Let the tension hang there a bit, you know? I look at my pack of camels on the desk next to me, look down at him and ask (as if I do not know): ‘For what?’ ‘
Maggie Haberman reported from New York.