Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) says he regrets not fighting against former President Clinton’s impeachment.
Boehner made the admission in his new memoir “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” according to The New York Times.
Boehner, who was first elected to Congress in 1991, writes in his book that former Rep. Tom DeLay (Texas), who was the No. 2 Republican in the House at the time, led a politically motivated campaign against Clinton over the then-president’s affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky.
The House voted to impeach Clinton on two articles, that he had lied to a grand jury and that he had obstructed justice.
But Boehner said it was really just because of DeLay.
“In my view, Republicans impeached him for one reason and one reason only — because it was strenuously recommended to us by one Tom DeLay,” Boehner writes, according to the Times. “Tom believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these House seats, would be a big win politically, and he convinced enough of the membership and the G.O.P. base that this was true.”
“I was on board at the time,” Boehner continues. “I won’t pretend otherwise. But I regret it now. I regret that I didn’t fight against it.”
Clinton ended up not being convicted by the Senate, and the 1998 midterm elections were a disappointment for Republicans, who lost five House seats.
The election took place in the middle of the impeachment process for Clinton.
The excerpt is the latest to come out of Boehner’s book, in which he doesn’t hold back his feelings about his time in Washington and his views of the GOP.
In an excerpt previously published by the Times on Thursday, Boehner blamed President Trump for inciting the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November,” Boehner wrote.