Classified material doesn’t simply include those things involving intelligence and defense agencies such as the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. It also includes material that involves privileged conversations pertaining to national security.

I note this because reading through John Bolton’s tale of his time as President Trump’s national security adviser, it’s not immediately clear where the supposedly classified material is to be found. The Room Where It Happened offers no accounts of how the United States stole secret information from Beijing or Moscow. Or how intercepted phone calls factored into Trump’s tweets toward foreign leaders. Or how the USS Jimmy Carter was doing cool stuff on the ocean floor.