President Trump asked his then-National Security Adviser John Bolton to help him with his campaign to put pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political rivals during an Oval Office conversation last May, Bolton claims in a manuscript of his forthcoming memoir. The meeting was also said to be attended by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney; and White House counsel Pat Cipollone. During the roughly 10-minute conversation, Bolton writes that Trump ordered him to call newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and make sure that he would meet with Giuliani on his trip to Ukraine. Bolton says he never made the call. Giuliani told a Times reporter that Bolton is “making some of it up,” then backtracked, saying, “I wouldn’t call it making it up, but he’s acting like a real scumbag by never telling me that he objected once, & then saying I was a time bomb, or a firecracker or something.”

Shortly after the Times posted the new memoir details, reporter Maggie Haberman posted a comment from Trump denying Bolton’s allegation: “I never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudy Giuliani, one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of N.Y.C., to meet with President Zelensky. That meeting never happened.”