US judge says he cannot stop publication of tell-all book even though it ‘gambles with national security’
A US judge has lashed former national security adviser John Bolton for writing a tell-all book about the White House just months after he was sacked. But the book will still be published this week.
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A US judge has criticised Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton for “gambling with the national security of the US” by writing a tell-all book about the White House just months after he was sacked.
While in countries like Australia national secrets are routinely locked away from the public for decades, Mr Bolton has breathtakingly been cleared to publish his insider account while his former boss is still in office – and seeking re-election.
Mr Trump asked whether Mr Bolton – branded a “traitor” by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – should now end up in jail.
Wow, I finally agree with failed political consultant Steve Schmidt, who called Wacko John Bolton “a despicable man who failed in his duty to protect America.†Also stated that he should never be allowed to serve in government again. So true! Plain and simple, John Bolton,....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2020
US District Judge Royce Lamberth was scathing of Mr Bolton’s efforts to skirt around detailed review processes in seeking to publish his book.
But he admitted his hands were tied when it came to White House applications for the court to block publication of The Room Where It Happened.
Judge Lamberth frowned upon the way the sacked adviser went about publishing the book. Mr Bolton took it “upon himself to publish his book without securing final approval from national intelligence authorities” and perhaps caused irreparable harm to national security, the judge said.
“While Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns, the government has not established that an injunction is an appropriate remedy,” Judge Lamberth wrote.
His conclusion means the 600-page book – the contents of which have been completely rejected by President Trump and his team – will be available for purchase on Tuesday.
President Trump has called the memoir by his former national security adviser “highly inappropriate”, and has asked if Bolton belongs in jail.
The judge wrote that attempting to block its release would be futile with 200,000 copies already distributed to booksellers.
“A single dedicated individual with a book in hand could publish its contents far and wide from his local coffee shop,” Judge Lamberth wrote.
“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe – many in newsrooms – the damage is done.
“There is no restoring the status quo.”
However, the judge said he was concerned that Bolton had “gambled with the national security of the United States” by opting out of a prepublication review process.
The 71-year-old Bolton served as Trump’s national security adviser from April of 2018 until September of 2019.
The explosive memoir includes a first-person account of how Mr Trump conducts himself in the White House.
Mr Bolton is critical of the president and much of his senior team, writing that Mr Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government”.
Earlier, Judge Lamberth had said he did not think he could stop publication of the book.
“The horse, as we used to say in Texas, seems to be out of the barn,” Judge Lamberth of the DC District Court said during the hearing.
“It certainly looks difficult to me about what I can do about those books all over the country.”
Mr Bolton’s lawyers argued that the White House was trying to stop him from embarrassing President Trump with the release of his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.
His legal team said it was simply too late to stop the sale of the book, which is set to come out Tuesday, as it’s already been published and is in the hands of major news organisations.
Justice Department lawyer David Morrell said there were three instances of passages in the book that were classified by others in the administration after he went through several rounds of reviews with the National Security Council reviewer Ellen Knight.
Judge Lamberth also grilled Mr Bolton’s lawyer for how the former adviser ended his review process and pushed his book to publication.
He “walked away” from the review process, the judge, asking why Mr Bolton hadn’t sued when the book’s review dragged on.
The judge has pointed out that Mr Bolton didn’t wait for an official letter from the administration clearing him to publish.
The Justice Department claims that Mr Bolton breached his employment contract, and should have to give up proceeds from the book.
TRUMP ASKED CHINA FOR ELECTION HELP: BOLTON
A controversial new book by a former White House insider accuses US President Donald Trump of asking Chinese president Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 election.
In an excerpt published in The Wall St Journal, former national security Adviser John Bolton portrays Mr Trump as bumbling and ignorant and accuses him of pandering to autocrats.
Mr Bolton, who was sacked after “strongly disagreeing” with Mr Trump last September, also claimed the president green-lit China’s Uygher concentration camps and threatened to invade Venezuela.
The White House says the book contains classified material and the Justice Department has filed a federal lawsuit against Bolton to prevent the book being published next week.
However, some US media outlets started publishing details, including the extract, on Wednesday, local time.
White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway earlier said publishing the book would undermine “the nation’s security”.
“I would just think that it’s very important to the nation’s security, not even the president himself, but for the presidency itself and the nation’s security to make sure the review processes have been completed,” she said.
She also challenged reporters to fact-check the book, which is one of several critical of the president by disaffected former members of Mr Trump’s inner circle.
“I know that you’re all for fact-checking, so I hope you’ll apply that to all types of work,” she said.
The published extract accuses key current administration officials of insulting the president behind his back and is highly critical of his leadership.
Mr Bolton described Mr Trump’s effort to shift a conversation with Xi to domestic politics at a June 2019, summit in Osaka as “stunning”.
He claims Mr Trump asked Xi to help his re-election prospects by purchasing more American farm products.
“Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” he writes.
Mr Bolton, who was paid $A2.5 million to dish on his former boss and paints himself positively throughout the extract, said many of Mr Trump’s decisions were focused on his re-election in November.
“In fact, I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” he alleges.
“These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behaviour that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency.”
He also says the Democrat-led impeachment – at which he controversially refused to give evidence – was too narrow in scope.
“Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behaviour across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different,” Mr Bolton claims.
He also claims Mr Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.”
The claim that Mr Trump sought aid from China to sway the election is similar to that which led to the failed attempt to impeach him over a similar charge involving a conversation with Ukraine’s president.
The New York Times was critical of Mr Bolton’s new book, describing it in one review as “bloated with self-importance”.
“The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what is mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged”, the review read.
Mr Bolton tried to publish his book, The Room Where It Happened, in January, but it went through numerous reviews for classified information by the National Security Council, and the date was pushed back to June 23.
This may be delayed further by the ongoing Justice Department suit.