The White House informed former national security adviser John Bolton that his forthcoming tell-all still includes classified information, but the book has already been shipped to warehouses.
Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, is set to be released on June 23.
John Eisenberg, a deputy White House counsel, told Bolton’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, that the book still contains information that could be a security threat after learning that the former adviser plans to move ahead with publication, according to the New York Times.
“The current draft manuscript still contains classified material,” Eisenberg wrote in a letter to Cooper.
“As we advised your client when he signed the nondisclosure agreements, and as he should be well aware as a former assistant to the president for national security affairs in this administration, the unauthorized disclosure of classified information could be exploited by a foreign power, thereby causing significant harm to the national security of the United States,” he added.
Eisenberg said Bolton would be given a redacted copy of the manuscript by June 19, days before publication.
A spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, said it has already been sent to warehouses.
The book was originally supposed to be released on March 17 but has been delayed twice amid an extensive review by the National Security Council. Bolton has told associates that he made changes to the book to pacify concerns about national security and that he believes the White House is using the excuse to try and stop his account of working under President Trump from becoming public.
Bolton and Trump have publicly quarreled over the book’s contents, some of which were leaked earlier this year, including details about Trump’s phone call with Ukraine that became the basis for his impeachment. Bolton wrote that Trump withheld security aid to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating his political rival Joe Biden.
There was growing pressure to call Bolton as a witness during Trump’s impeachment trial, but Republicans declined, and the president claimed his testimony would threaten national security.
“He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader, and it’s not very positive, and then I have to deal on behalf of the country? It’s going to be very hard. It’s going to make the job very hard. He knows other things, and I don’t know if we left on the best of terms,” Trump said at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
Bolton left the White House in September after clashing with Trump on major foreign policy issues.
