WASHINGTON — Former National Security Adviser John Bolton defeated the U.S. government’s last-ditch request to delay the publication of a tell-all memoir that paints an unflattering portrait of President Donald Trump.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to block the publication on national security grounds, paving the way for “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” to go on sale June 23.
In his judgment released Saturday, Lamberth wrote: “Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States. He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability. But these facts do not control the motion before the Court. The government has failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm. Its motion is accordingly DENIED.”
On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued Bolton for breach of contract, claiming he had pulled out of the prepublication review process that he agreed to undergo when he got his security clearance. The next day, the government escalated its response, seeking an injunction to stop the book’s publication, even though detailed excerpts were already appearing in major newspapers and some 200,000 copies had been shipped to booksellers.
Bolton argued the government was stalling on the review to ensure it didn’t come out before November and hurt the president’s chances at reelection. The former NSA adviser also said the publication is protected under the First Amendment.
According to reviews and published excerpts, Bolton’s book paints an unflattering portrait of the White House, describing Trump as ignorant of basic foreign policy facts and motivated largely by political self-interest. In one passage that has been widely reported, Bolton wrote that Trump urged the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to buy agricultural products from the United States because it would help the Trump campaign build political support in rural states.
The prepublication review process began about six months ago, when Bolton submitted an early draft to Ellen Knight, an official on the National Security Council, according to the government’s initial lawsuit. After several rounds of edits, Knight concluded in April that the book no longer contained classified information, the complaint said. But in May, Michael Ellis, a senior NSC official, reopened the review process.
Ellis, who purportedly discovered classified material late in the pre-publication review process, didn’t have training on how to identify such material until June, according to Bolton.
Bolton’s move to go ahead with publishing the book was an “unprecedented decision by an author to submit a manuscript for pre-publication revue but then to bail out of that process before it’s completed,” government lawyer David Morrell argued. “There is a massive interest that the government has here in ensuring that authors who become disgruntled and don’t like the process aren’t able to just bail out.”
Under questioning from the judge, Morrell said he isn’t aware if the president had personally directed intelligence officials to designate any material from the book as classified.
“There are certain passages in this book that will damage the national security of the United States,” Morrell said. “These NDAs aren’t just bureaucratic contrivances. They serve an important function,” he said, referring to a non-disclosure agreement Bolton signed.
All week, however, legal experts dismissed the possibility that the White House could stop the book’s publication, citing the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court rejected a similar request from President Richard Nixon.
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