The Justice Department’s move to open a criminal investigation into the publication of former national security adviser John Bolton’s memoir sends a chilling signal to all people who value free speech.
Criminal charges, if they come, would look like a horrendously political prosecution, yet another piece of evidence that the Trump Justice Department has become a virtual arm of the Trump reelection campaign. It comes just as almost the only independent top official there, the department’s inspector general, has quite understandably opened his own inquiry into Attorney General William Barr’s intervention in the sentencing recommendations for Trump friend and noted dirty trickster Roger Stone.
And what is the allegation against Barr? Well, two department officials, one of them under oath, say that Barr’s intervention was impermissibly politically motivated. They join a spate of other, similar criticisms against Barr’s regime, one of which was manifested in the resignation of another top department prosecutor in protest over what she says is his politicization of an investigation into the origins of the controversial “Russia probe” that so bedeviled President Trump.
All of which adds context to the suspicion that the criminal investigation of Bolton, one that Trump specifically threatened several months ago, is another misuse of the Justice Department for political payback rather than solid legal considerations.
Bolton is accused of revealing classified information in his book, after not waiting for an official letter telling him all the material therein was unclassified. Concerns for classified information aren’t irrelevant. Some of us who are national-security hawks appreciate almost all efforts to protect truly security-related state secrets.
On the other hand, a very real problem of “overclassification” exists, with officials using the cloak of security to hide what really should be public information, the secrecy of which is hardly essential for national defense or diplomacy. In a society of liberty that holds the rights to free speech and religion as the “first freedoms,” classification should be the exception, not the rule. Indeed, overclassification actually can do more to harm security than to help it.
“Restricting access to information prevents timely analysis and impedes decision-making by limiting debate on key policy issues to small groups of people within the government,” wrote two top analysts at the site Defense360. They are right: The more limited the access to information, the more limited will be the intellectual resources to apply it best.
Moreover, and very much to the point with regard to Bolton, the authors write that “the perception that government officials are using [classification] to hide their own malfeasance contributes to widespread public disillusionment.” In short, overclassification can erode public faith in the constitutional system. Our divided society can’t afford much more of that.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: If various top officials can’t even agree among themselves whether some piece of information is technically classified, then it probably shouldn’t be classified at all. The spirit of the First Amendment should prevail, so public disclosure should be favored. More importantly, the purveyor of that information shouldn’t be criminally liable for having released it, especially if he made good-faith efforts to ascertain its status. At very worst, it should be seen as a civil violation, not criminal.
All of which leads us back to Bolton’s book. Bolton made yeoman’s efforts to follow the right procedures, undergoing a multistage review of all the information in his book. In late April, the National Security Council’s highest official for prepublication review informed Bolton that his most recent edits had satisfied all her classification concerns. In an unprecedented move, however, the White House, through a newly appointed official with no background in such matters, initiated yet another review of the material without advising Bolton of it.
When no official letter came confirming the main NSC reviewers’ approval, with the book publisher already having delayed release of the book, and with justifiable suspicions that the White House was slow-walking formal approval for merely political reasons, Bolton went ahead and gave the publisher the green light to release the memoir.
Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, contained numerous accounts of Trump’s behavior, almost all supported by contemporaneous notes, that were politically embarrassing for the president. The Trumpian yen for vengeance is well known, and this new criminal inquiry absolutely reeks of politicized vengeance rather than having any appearance of protecting true security interests. If there truly was a technical violation in the book, then perhaps a civil fine would be in order.
Either way, a criminal prosecution looks appallingly abusive.
