Trump’s lawyers say they didn’t know Bolton’s book was a problem

When John Bolton’s book manuscript landed on the desk of a White House national-security aide shortly after Christmas, no one had to page through it to know that the draft could upend the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

Now the question of who did review the book — and to what extent — has become a subject 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 the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone.

But the president’s impeachment defense lawyers — Cipollone among them — insisted Wednesday that they were unaware it contained the explosive revelation by Bolton, the former national-security adviser, that Trump had directly linked aid for Ukraine to investigations he sought for personal gain.

“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 also 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 classified information, which would also serve to help keep more damning details from coming out during the impeachment trial.

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: Because Bolton could be called to testify to the Senate shortly, he said, 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.”

White House officials insist that their handling of Bolton’s manuscript was legally sound. But however by the book they played the initial review of the manuscript, the strategy proved politically treacherous.

Bolton’s account came out 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 scramble to address the charge.

And Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader who had worked to keep witnesses out of the impeachment trial, raged that he was not warned that such dramatic 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 that was about the president’s Ukraine dealings and set off impeachment proceedings.

Though Cipollone was briefed about the manuscript, lawyers for the National Security Council withheld the draft from other White House officials, administration officials said. 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 officials said.