An attorney for John Bolton pushed back on the White House assertion that the former national security adviser’s forthcoming book contains classified information.
In an email sent to the White House on Jan. 24, Bolton’s lawyer Charles Cooper asked for an expedited review of a chapter about Ukraine in case the former national security adviser is called to testify in President Trump’s impeachment trial.
“We do not believe that any of that information could reasonably be considered classified,” Cooper wrote, according to a copy of the email he released Wednesday.
Cooper said Bolton, 71, is “preparing” for the possibility that he is called to testify and argued that it is “imperative that we have the results of your review of that chapter as soon as possible.”
Bolton’s tell-all book about his time in the White House is set to be released March 17, but the White House’s National Security Council’s Records Management Division sent a letter to Bolton’s attorney last week that said his manuscript “appears to contain significant amounts of classified information.”
“Under federal law and the nondisclosure agreements your client signed, as a condition for gaining access to classified information, the manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information,” the letter said.
Revelations about the contents of Bolton’s book have fueled calls to bring him in as a witness in the Senate trial. Bolton alleged that Trump made security aid to Ukraine dependent on the country investigating his political rival Joe Biden, undermining the Trump defense team’s claim that the freeze of security assistance was not linked to the investigation.
Trump, 73, has claimed the allegations in the book are “untrue.”
