Judge rules Bolton can publish his memoir

Former Trump adviser may have to forfeit $2M over classified information

WASHINGTON— John Bolton, one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s former national security advisers, can go forward with the publication of his memoir, a federal judge ruled on Saturday, rejecting the administration’s request for an order that he try to pull the book back and saying it was too late for such an order to succeed.

“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo,” wrote Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia.

But in a 10-page opinion, Lamberth also suggested that Bolton may be in jeopardy of forfeiting his $2-million advance, as the Justice Department has separately requested — and that he could be prosecuted for allowing the book to be published before receiving final notice that a prepublication review to scrub out classified information was complete.

“Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” Lamberth wrote. “He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability. But these facts do not control the motion before the court. The government has failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm.”

The main elements of the book, “The Room Where It Happened,” an unflattering account of Trump’s conduct in office, have already been widely reported.

Trump has accused Bolton of lying — and false information is not classified. But he has also made clear that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute his former aide for spilling secrets, a position he reiterated on Saturday.

The president wrote on Twitter that Bolton “broke the law by releasing Classified Information (in massive amounts). He must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him. This should never to happen again!!!”

Still, Bolton won the first round by defeating the Justice Department’s request for an order that he try to prevent further dissemination of his book. The department had also claimed that such an order could bind his publisher, Simon & Schuster, and bookstores that already have copies. The book goes on sale next week.

In a statement, Charles J. Cooper, a lawyer for Bolton, praised Lamberth’s decision but took exception to the judge’s strong suggestion that his client had violated his agreement or published classified information.

Lamberth issued the ruling after holding a public hearing Friday about the government’s request in which he had strongly signaled that he believed the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction had come too late to ensure that any classified information in the book would remain secret.

Lamberth will also oversee the part of the lawsuit that seeks to seize Bolton’s proceeds for writing the book as a penalty for purportedly breaching the agreements he signed as a condition of receiving classified information to go through the prepublication review process. Cooper has argued that Bolton lived up to them.

The judge wrote that after viewing classified declarations and discussing them in a closed hearing, he was “persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”