The Trump administration again looks terrible and former national security adviser John Bolton looks significantly better after the delivery of a remarkably informative letter from the senior official who reviewed Bolton’s recent book.
On behalf of Ellen Knight, the former senior director for records access and information security management at the National Security Council, attorney Kenneth Wainstein sent the 18-page letter to lawyers for Bolton and for the Justice Department, which has threatened Bolton with criminal prosecution for allegedly publishing classified information.
The letter makes clear Knight’s contention that no classified information remained in Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. Its unambiguous subtext is that President Trump’s team again politicized and abused freedom of speech guarantees and national security in a naked bid to avoid embarrassment to the president.
In a passage that has received far less attention, Knight refutes the widespread public impression that Bolton’s greed for profits led him to withhold important information from the Ukraine-related impeachment investigation and the trial of Trump. Instead, Bolton repeatedly tried to get permission to release the information but was denied.
Already, too few people have credited Bolton for essentially begging the Senate to subpoena him so he could testify under oath without risking legal repercussions. Knight’s letter shows that Bolton also tried other means to provide the desired information for the public good.
“On one occasion when [Bolton’s lawyer] requested that Ms. Knight’s staff prioritize the Ukraine chapter in the manuscript for prepublication review to make it publicly available during the impeachment trial, the then-Deputy Legal Advisor [Michael] Ellis instructed her to temporarily withhold any response,” the letter stated.
In other words, Bolton was not trying to withhold the information for purposes of book profiteering but because he did not yet have notice that it was unclassified. He was convinced it was unclassified and wanted permission to discuss it. But without clearance and without a subpoena, he would have put himself in legal jeopardy by setting it before the public.
Considering that the politicized Justice Department is now threatening criminal prosecution for releasing the information six months later, Bolton was right. But he tried, in multiple ways, to provide the relevant material.
Knight, via lawyer Wainstein, also portrays Bolton as acting “in good faith” throughout the process, rather than acting without regard to national security secrets: “Ms. Knight always felt his intention was to cooperate with and complete the review.”
While the letter largely portrays Bolton in favorable terms (other than being “gruff and demanding,” which is his well-established reputation), it makes the Trump administration look awful. Again and again, it worked to slow down the review process without any explanation or attempt to cooperate with Bolton or consult with Knight. Though Knight was a trained career official who had overseen 135 prior prepublication review requests, the White House assigned Ellis, a newly appointed official with no background in such reviews, to overrule the determinations she and her staff made in the course of many hundreds of hours of painstaking work.
Amazingly, Ellis actually conducted his own, extraneous classification analysis before he was trained in the process and without once even asking for Knight’s input or explanations. White House officials, according to Knight, also fibbed to her about why they took so long to clear the book after her staff already had cleared it: They blamed administrative delays caused by COVID-19 when the coronavirus had nothing to do with it.
Finally, according to Wainstein, White House officials repeatedly pressured Knight to sign misleading affidavits about the review process. Knight said she believed their motives were primarily political, rather than truly based on national security interests, and remains concerned that the government is improperly blocking “discovery” requests from Bolton’s team in order to hide “information that might be at odds with the narrative [the White House] has propounded.”
One cannot read Knight’s remarkable document without getting a sense that Team Trump acted at least somewhat corruptly. Meanwhile, Knight repeatedly makes clear her concern that the White House might have infringed on a “citizen’s right to publish all First Amendment-protected information … in a way that does not disclose government secrets.” It is, she notes, a “constitutional right,” but it was a right that Team Trump seemed willing to trample.
If Attorney General William Barr really cares about justice, he should direct the Justice Department to drop its criminal investigation of Bolton and instead open a review of White House malfeasance.
