Lawsuit over Bolton book can proceed
The Trump administration can move forward with its lawsuit against former national security adviser John Bolton over his tellall book, a judge ruled Thursday in denying a request to dismiss the complaint.
The Justice Department alleges that Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened” contains classified information, and the government sued in
June to try to prevent the release. Though the book was published, a suit accusing Bolton of breaking contracts with the government by disclosing classified information and by failing to complete a required prepublication review can proceed, U.S District Judge Royce Lamberth said in a 27page opinion.
The Justice Department, the judge wrote, “plausibly pleads that Bolton breached those obligations.”
Charles Cooper, Bolton’s lawyer, said in an email that the ruling, “which we are still studying, means that the case will now move forward to the phase in which the parties will develop and present their evidence.”
The book, which details Bolton’s 17 months as Trump’s national security adviser, contains descriptions of conversations with foreign leaders that could be seen as politically damaging to the president. Those include accounts that Trump tied providing military aid to Ukraine to that country’s willingness to conduct investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, and that Trump asked China’s President Xi Jinping to help his re-election prospects.
Lamberth in June denied the government’s request for an injunction to block the book from being published, given that thousands of copies had already been distributed. But in the same order, he also scolded Bolton for moving ahead with the book’s publication without waiting for formal, written authorization that the book had been cleared.
His order clears the way for the Justice Department’s suit to move forward, including the government’s efforts to seize proceeds from the book. The judge said the government has reasonably shown that Bolton disclosed classified information without first confirming that it was unclassified.
“Even if Bolton operated out of an abundance of caution in submitting his manuscript for review, the very existence of his caution leads to a fair inference that Bolton was less than certain as to the status of the manuscript,” Lamberth wrote. “And the allegation that classified material was actually present in the manuscript makes it more likely that Bolton harboured doubts as to whether everything in his manuscript was unclassified.”
Bolton’s lawyers have maintained that he worked for months with a White House career official, Ellen Knight, to ensure that the manuscript was carefully screened for classified information, with Knight concluding that review in April by determining that the book was now free of such material.