The Trump administration took emergency action on Wednesday to try and block the release of John Bolton’s book after excerpts leaked across the media landscape.
The application that the Justice Department filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asked Judge Royce Lamberth to schedule a hearing on Friday on a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Bolton “seeking to enjoin publication of a book containing classified information.”
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Bolton on Tuesday, asking a judge to stop the release of The Room Where It Happened, which is set to hit bookshelves on June 23.
Multiple news outlets, including the Washington Examiner, have obtained early copies of the former national security adviser’s memoir and have published excerpts over the past few hours.
Bolton wrote in one section that Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping last year to assist him with his reelection effort. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who claims to have been present at that discussion, told lawmakers at a hearing Wednesday that Bolton’s claims were “absolutely untrue.”
Trump told the Wall Street Journal that Bolton is a “liar.”
Bolton, who left the White House last September after a year and a half in the Trump administration, was originally wanted to publish his highly-anticipated book in early 2020, but numerous rounds of prepublication review for classified information by the National Security Council pushed the book’s sale date back. Bolton and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, argue that they have adhered to classification rules and forged ahead with sending copies of the book to warehouses across the country.
“Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility. Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing,” the publisher said in a statement Wednesday evening.
The Justice Department insisted in its Wednesday court filing that the review process is not finished.
“Only by completing the review process can the Government ensure that any personal benefits Defendant hopes to reap from this writing will not come at the expense of the national security,” the Justice Department said.
The move by the Justice Department follows its Tuesday motion to block Bolton from receiving any of the proceeds from the sale of the book. There have been multiple reports that the Justice Department may be considering criminal charges against Bolton for allegedly disseminating classified information.
“A National Security Advisor to a sitting President possesses national security information like few others … Such individuals are required by contractual and fiduciary obligations to submit their manuscripts for prepublication review and not to publish them without having received written approval to do so,” the Justice Department told the court on Wednesday. “In this case, defendant John Bolton has not received any such approval, but unilaterally has decided to abandon the prepublication review process that he agreed to and instead plans to disseminate classified information as he sees fit in order to profit from his book.”
The Justice Department argued that Bolton’s manuscript “still contains classified information” and said this could be confirmed by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center William Evanina, and Michael Ellis, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence programs. DOJ lawyers argued that “disclosure of the manuscript will damage the national security of the United States,” and so “the United States asks this Court to hold Defendant to the legal obligations he freely assumed as a condition of receiving access to classified information and prevent the harm to national security that will result if his manuscript is published to the world.”
Bolton’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper, argued in the Wall Street Journal last week that Ellen Knight, the National Security Council’s senior director for prepublication review of materials written by NSC personnel, and Bolton’s team had engaged in “perhaps the most extensive and intensive prepublication review in NSC history,” going through the nearly 600-page manuscript four times, often line by line.
Bolton offered to testify in Trump’s Ukraine-related impeachment trial earlier this year only if the Republican-led Senate issued a subpoena against him, which the upper chamber declined to do. The Democrat-led House had asked Bolton to testify but, after he refused, declined to issue a subpoena to compel his testimony through the courts.
The House impeached Trump on allegations of abuse of power related to Ukraine and of obstruction of Congress in December, but the Senate acquitted him following an impeachment trial in February.
