Tributes file in for legal icon
WASHINGTON — White House aides took unprecedented steps to “commandeer” a prepublication review of a book by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton and erroneously claimed it contained classified information to prevent its public release, a lawyer for a career official told a courtwednesday.
Kenneth Wainstein, an attorney for the official who conducted the clearance review, Ellen Knight, wrote that she came forward to warn against the “politicization” of government proceedings.
He said that soon after requesting a copy of the manuscript Jan. 6, for example, Trump appointees halted a response to a request by Bolton to prioritize approval of a chapter about President Donald Trump's interactions with Ukraine so it could be public during the Senate impeachment trial.
The Trump administration unsuccessfully sued in June to block the release of Bolton's Whitehouse memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,”
after a review completed by Knight concluded in April it no longer contained classified information.
At that point, however, an untrained Trump appointee undertook a new review and wrongly challenged hundreds of passages leading to the government litigation, Knight asserted.
Objecting that “a designedly apolitical process had been commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose,” Knight said several government attorneys agreed in a later debriefing when she speculated that the reason the Justice Department was suing Bolton was “because the most powerfulmanin theworld said that it needed to happen,” Wainstein wrote.
National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot said the agency disagreed strongly with Knight's assertion that additional review was politically motivated, saying high ranking officials disagreedthat her clearedversion contained no classified information.
“These officials had access to more information than Ms. Knight and were in a better position to assess
classification,” Ullyot said. “The National Security Council actedtoprotect exceptionally sensitive classified information that Ms. Knight simply missed.”
Wednesday's court filing is the latest revelation triggered by Bolton's disclosures over his 17-month tenure as Trump's top national security official, inwhich he painted a withering portrait of Trump as an
“erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” leader who repeatedly sought foreign leaders' assistance for his personal benefit.
It comes after a June 20 ruling in which U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia denied the Trump administration's request to halt publication, but said that government might be able to seize Bolton's profits if the book's release came without written White House authorization that it contained no classified material.
Bolton “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability” in further litigation, the judge warned.
All sides are due back in court today for further arguments. It's not clear what impact Knight's disclosures may have.
Lamberth said Bolton should have sued the government instead of”unilaterally” opting out of the reviewprocess if hewas dissatisfied with it.
Separately, a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas to Bolton's publisher as part of a Justice Department investigation into whether he criminally mishandled classified information in the book.
In a statementlastweek, Bolton's lawyer, Charles Cooper, said, “Ambassador Bolton emphatically rejects any claim that he acted improperly, let alone criminally, in connection with the publication of his book, and he will cooperate fully, as he has throughout, with any official inquiry into his conduct.”
The Whitehouse didn't respond to a request for comment.