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.
On paper, this would appear to undermine the Justice Department’s aggressive effort last week to see the book’s release blocked.
Not so fast. After all, Bolton’s book does include a whole lot of conversations pertaining to national security.
These conversations include Bolton’s regular recording of what his foreign counterparts, such as Britain’s Sir Mark Sedwill, had to say on certain sensitive foreign policy issues. Take Bolton’s description of a briefing Sedwill provided Trump and then-Prime Minister Theresa May on the Russian GRU’s March 2018 chemical weapons attack. While Bolton does not present the intelligence specifics as to what the British told Trump and company, he does note Sedwill’s analytical assessment that the attack was a deliberate and serious act of aggression against “nuclear power” Britain. The nature of Sedwill’s position means that his words would have been classified top secret by the British government. In turn, they would have been construed by the U.S. government as necessarily privileged.
Why?
Well, because Russia’s learning of that assessment might jeopardize Britain’s relations with or strategy toward Moscow. Even if these conversations don’t directly pertain to U.S. intelligence assessments or intelligence classifications, these conversations would have been independently classified top secret at the British level and thus would have been reflexively viewed by Britain’s closest ally in the same manner.
This dynamic sustains throughout Bolton’s book. The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations makes heavy reference to South Korean government deliberations and strategy toward North Korea, for example.
It explains why, although it was always going to be impractical for the U.S. government to censor Bolton’s book once it had been printed and sent to journalists, the government was so keen to see this story pulped.
