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 duplicate 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 cause and one cause 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 gained’t fake in any other case. However I remorse it now. I remorse that I didn’t battle 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 filled with colourful tales from his time in Congress.
He pulls no punches for these he views as far-right bomb-throwers in his celebration. (He saves a number of notably 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 rebellion” by his supporters on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Occasion has been taken over by “whack jobs.”
Mr. Trump’s “refusal to simply 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 file 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 crucial 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 one of the best man in Mr. Younger’s marriage ceremony.)
Mr. Boehner additionally relays an encounter in his workplace through which 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 informed that Meadows needed 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 have been about to wish. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he mentioned, 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 product of their star organizer on the verge of tears, however that wasn’t my drawback.”
Mr. Boehner seems to be down on the man who would later grow to be Mr. Trump’s White Home chief of workers.
“I took a protracted, gradual drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the strain cling there just a little, you already know? I checked out my pack of Camels on the desk subsequent to me, then I appeared down at him, and requested (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
