The Department of Justice on Tuesday filed suit against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, claiming his nearly 600-page memoir contains classified information and arguing publication should be delayed pending further vetting by the National Security Council.
According to The New York Times, Bolton’s book allegedly confirms one of House Democrats’ core allegations leading to the president’s impeachment: Bolton claims Trump told him last summer to keep withholding nearly $400 in military aid from Ukraine until the country agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who previously sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
The book, titled, “The Room Where it Happened,” is set for release on June 23. According to a press release from publisher Simon & Schuster, Bolton claims that House lawmakers committed “impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy.”
Bolton, the publisher continued, “documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment effort, criticized Bolton in early February for not signing an affidavit addressing what he knew about the Ukraine affair after the Senate voted against hearing more witnesses during Trump’s trial.
In January, Bolton submitted a manuscript to the Trump administration for a review. The administration says Bolton’s publisher pushed out a press release last week with no advance notice and without fully complying with confidentiality agreements and efforts to remove sensitive material from the final product.
“Simply put, Defendant struck a bargain with the United States as a condition of his employment in one of the most sensitive and important national security positions in the United States Government and now wants to renege on that bargain by unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public,” the Department of Justice argued in its complaint.
The administration said it is “not seeking to censor any legitimate aspect” of Bolton’s manuscript. “It merely seeks an order requiring defendant to complete the prepublication review process” and is “free of classified information.”
The suit asks the government to seize money Bolton made from the book and to order him to “instruct or request his publisher” to “take any and all available steps to retrieve and dispose” of any copies of the book in the possession of a third party.
Trump on Monday told reporters that he considers “every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law.”
“Maybe he’s not telling the truth,” Trump added. “He’s been known not to tell the truth, a lot.”
Back in January, Trump tweeted that he “NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.” He said Bolton was merely trying “to sell a book.”
Simon & Schuster, in a statement, said that in the months leading up to publication, “Bolton worked in cooperation with the National Security Council to incorporate changes to the text that addressed NSC concerns. The final, published version of this book reflects those changes, and Simon & Schuster is fully supportive of Ambassador Bolton’s First Amendment right to tell the story of his time in the Trump White House.”
A spokesman for Simon & Schuster told The Times the lawsuit is “nothing more than the latest in a long-running series of efforts by the administration to quash publication of a book it deems unflattering to the president."
Over the last two days, Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, has retweeted posts by the American Civil Liberties Union and PEN America defending his right to publish.
“Fifty years ago, (The U.S. Supreme Court) rejected the Nixon administration’s attempt to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, establishing that government censorship is unconstitutional,” the ACLU tweeted. “Any Trump administration efforts to stop John Bolton’s book from being published are doomed to fail.”
Bolton is scheduled for an exclusive interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz at 9 a.m. EST.