Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper is moving ahead with a memoir detailing his time in the Trump administration after a fight with the Department of Defense over redactions.
Esper’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, announced on Friday that they dismissed their lawsuit against the DOD over the redactions that were put in place.
They dropped the suit because the Pentagon opted “to reverse its position on an overwhelming majority of the classification decisions it earlier asserted were so vital to the national security interest of the United States, when the fact is they never were,” Zaid said in a statement.
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The update ends the monthslong battle between Esper and the DOD over the classification of aspects the department said would jeopardize national security.
Esper’s memoir, A Sacred Oath, will be published in May and will include “minimal redactions,” which “are not central to his memoir and will not disturb the flow of reading the book.”
Even though the publishing company is still moving forward with the memoir, the former defense secretary maintained that none of the still-redacted excerpts are “properly classified.”
Esper’s lawsuit, which he filed last November, contended that the Pentagon “has unlawfully imposed a prior restraint” on Esper “by delaying, obstructing, and infringing on his constitutional right to publish his unclassified manuscript” and that the Defense Department’s actions have “unreasonably delayed and prevented” his book from publishing.
“The lawsuit was filed because after taking months to review the Secretary’s manuscript, A Sacred Oath, which presents an unvarnished account of his tenure during the Trump administration, the Defendant redacted as classified significant swaths of information on more than fifty pages that absolutely gutted substantive content and important storylines,” Zaid added in the statement.
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The lawsuit followed the battle over former White House national security adviser John Bolton’s own book. Then-President Donald Trump fired Esper in November 2020 after he lost the presidential election.
