Didn’t know of Bolton’s allegation, attorneys say
WASHINGTON — Pat Cipollone and other White House counsel members insisted Wednesday that they were unaware that John Bolton’s book manuscript contained the allegation that President Donald Trump had directly linked aid for Ukraine to investigations he sought for personal gain.
Now the book and who reviewed it have become subjects of the Senate impeachment trial of Trump.
The White House has acknowledged that National Security Council staff members reviewed the draft and that they briefed Cipollone.
“No one from inside the White House or outside the White House told us publication of the book would be problematic for the president,” Patrick Philbin, a deputy White House counsel and one of Trump’s lawyers, said on the Senate floor. “We assumed Mr. Bolton was disgruntled and wouldn’t be saying a lot of nice things about the president, but no one told us anything like that.”
The acrimony between Bolton and the White House
escalated Wednesday as both sides jockeyed for the upper hand over whether he can publish his book as planned or must wait for government censors to strip it of information deemed as classified.
The National Security Council released a letter sent last week to a lawyer for Bolton saying that the draft contained “significant amounts” of classified information.
Bolton’s lawyer fired back, releasing his response sent last week to the White House. He argued that because Bolton could be called to testify before the Senate shortly, it was “imperative” that officials review his Ukraine writings immediately.
Trump also jumped in, saying on Twitter that he had fired Bolton because “if I had listened to him, we’d be in World War Six by now.”
The account from Bolton was reported in the middle of the president’s lawyers’ presentation of their impeachment defense, undercutting a key element — that the aid freeze was separate from Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations he stood to benefit from — and forcing the president’s defense team to address the allegation.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader who had worked to keep witnesses out of the impeachment trial, said he was not warned that such revelations could come at the eleventh hour.
But National Security Council lawyers and staff members believed they had little choice but to keep the book’s details closely held, according to people familiar with their decision-making. White House officials had faced accusations of a cover-up last year after deciding to initially block Congress from receiving the whistleblower complaint about the president’s dealings with Ukraine that set off impeachment proceedings.
White House officials insist that their handling of Bolton’s manuscript has been legally sound.
Administration officials said that though Cipollone was briefed about the manuscript, lawyers for the National Security Council — the foreign policy arm of the White House — withheld the draft from other White House officials. The lawyers asked career civil servants, not political appointees, to review the book, in an effort to ensure it was handled similarly to any other book written by a former official with access to classified secrets, the administration officials said.
One of the career lawyers, Yevgeny Vindman, did not take part in the review to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. His twin brother is Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Pentagon official detailed to the National Security Council and a key witness who testified in the impeachment hearings about the president’s Ukraine dealings.
The political appointees among the national security lawyers, Michael Ellis and his boss, John Eisenberg, saw the manuscript but had no direct role in scouring the document for potential classified material, according to a person familiar with the matter.
At critical moments throughout the Ukraine matter, Eisenberg and the National Security Council legal team have been drawn in, prompting questions by others in the White House about how they handled the issues. Eisenberg and Ellis handled the internal complaints immediately after a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and ordered records of the conversation be restricted. That conversation was the focus of the whistleblower complaint that led to the impeachment investigation.
The White House has said Cipollone did not review the manuscript or know details about its content. On Monday, a spokesman for the National Security Council said that “no White House personnel outside NSC have reviewed the manuscript.”
Former officials say that while there are few regulations constraining the National Security Council, officials adhere to past procedures, which in reviews of manuscripts allows them to notify other officials of their existence without allowing those officials to review their content.
The office that conducts prepublication reviews of manuscripts by former officials is staffed by career officials rather than political appointees, said Brian Egan, who served as legal adviser to the National Security Council from 2013 to 2016. The career officials, about half a dozen, conduct reviews among other responsibilities, including ensuring that no presidential records are destroyed, declassifying old presidential records and reviewing proposed speeches, papers and quotes by former officials.
Still, Egan said, it was routine for the office to circulate portions of a manuscript to subject-matter experts on the council staff for input, suggesting that it might have shared any portions of Bolton’s writings about Ukraine with the European affairs office.
Bolton’s manuscript was not shared with the European affairs office, a person familiar with the matter said.
Last Thursday, just days before details of Bolton’s draft were made public on Sunday, the White House notified Bolton’s lawyer that it had significant issues with classified information in the manuscript.
Some information in the manuscript was classified at the top-secret level, said the National Security Council letter, signed by Ellen Knight, a senior director for records. The council staff would work with Bolton to identify classified information to “ensure your client can tell his story in a manner that protects national security,” she wrote.
It was not clear what material the National Security Council staff considered classified and would seek to block. But Bolton’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, said in his response that if his client is called as a witness in the impeachment trial, he is sure to be asked questions that would involve the material contained in the Ukraine chapter of the manuscript.
Classification reviews can often drag on for years, delaying publication and drastically restricting what former officials can reveal in books.
The review process “is liable to abuse,” said Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who is representing former CIA and Air Force officers trying to publish books.
“I find it highly unlikely that a very experienced official such as Ambassador Bolton, the former national security adviser, would put top-secret material in his manuscript,” Carroll said.
Knight offered no deadlines for completing the review.