Trump Bid to Halt Bolton Tell-All May Be Late, Judge Says

(Bloomberg) — Former National Security Advisor John Bolton may have jumped the gun in moving to publish his tell-all memoir on President Donald Trump without completing a government review, but it’s probably too late to stop the sale of the book, a federal judge said.

“The horse seems to be out of the barn” with hundreds of thousands of copies already circulating, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington said at a hearing on Friday over the government’s request to block the June 23 release of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Lamberth didn’t rule on the government’s request but his comments suggested that neither side is heading for a clear victory. Even if Bolton is allowed to publish the book, the judge may decide that he breached his contract by refusing to complete the pre-publication review, allowing the government to seize his royalties.

At the hearing, Bolton’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper, said his client followed his contract “not just in spirit, but to the letter.”

But Lamberth disagreed. Bolton “went out on his own,” the judge said. “I don’t really understand why he decided to take that risk.”

Lamberth held another private hearing, with government lawyers only, to look over the disputed material in Bolton’s book. Bolton followed up with a request to see the material and access any other classified hearings.

The government said Bolton and his lawyers didn’t “need to know” what was being discussed.

“This answer makes no sense,” Bolton said in a filing after the hearing. Ambassador Bolton already knows the information in his book and the Government sent him a copy with its newly proposed redactions on June 16.”

“It also flies in the face of basic First Amendment and Due Process protections,” he added.

The hearing on Friday offered the first hints of how Lamberth may decide a legal battle that began this week when the Justice Department sued Bolton for breach of contract, claiming he had pulled out of a pre-publication review process designed to prevent former government employees from publishing classified information. The following day, the government escalated its response, seeking an injunction to stop the book’s publication.

But many snippets of the book are already known. The Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have already published accounts from the memoir. Bloomberg News also obtained a copy of the book before its official release. The memoir is the Number 1 best-seller in Amazon’s Kindle store.

The book paints an unflattering portrait of Trump, describing the president as ignorant of basic foreign policy facts and motivated largely by political self-interest. In one passage, Bolton writes that Trump urged the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to buy agricultural products from the United States because it would help his campaign build political support in rural states for reelection.

Trump called the book a “compilation of lies” in a post on Twitter Thursday.

The pre-publication review of Bolton’s book began about six months ago, when he submitted an early draft to Ellen Knight, an official at the National Security Agency, according to the government’s initial lawsuit. After several rounds of edits, Knight concluded in April that the book no longer contained classified information, according to the complaint. But in May, Michael Ellis, a senior National Security Council official, reopened the review process.

Bolton’s decision to publish the book even as government officials continued to examine it threatens to “damage the national security of the United States,” government lawyer David Morrell argued at the hearing. “There is a massive interest that the government has here in ensuring that authors who become disgruntled and don’t like the process aren’t able to just bail out.”

Bolton called the government’s effort to block the publication a “transparent” attempt to prevent him from revealing embarrassing facts about the president’s conduct in office ahead of the election.

All week legal experts have dismissed the possibility that the White House could stop the book’s publication, citing the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court rejected a similar request from President Richard Nixon.

During the hearing, Lamberth repeatedly pointed out that much of the book’s content is already public.