Trump Administration Seeks Injunction to Block Bolton Book

The Trump administration sought an emergency restraining order to stop the publication of a tell-all book by John Bolton, president Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor.

The government claims the book contains classified information and that Bolton failed to get approval to have the memoir published. It asked for a preliminary injunction to block the sales of the book.

“Disclosure of the manuscript will damage the national security of the United States,” the government said in the complaint.

The administration sued Bolton on Tuesday for breach of contract, but didn’t ask for a restraining order or an injunction at the time. Experts had suggested that such an order will be difficult to secure because the Supreme Court rejected a similar attempt by the Nixon administration to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

The injunction should “instruct his publisher to take any and all available steps to retrieve and destroy any copies of the book that may be in the possession of any third party,” the government said in the filing in Washington federal court.

The U.S. asked a judge to hold a hearing on its request for an injunction on June 19, since the book is scheduled to be released on June 23.

Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, says the injunction requested by the government will accomplish nothing.

“Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility,” the publisher said in a statement. “Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world.”

The Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have already published excerpts from the book that paint an unflattering picture of Trump.

The excerpts rattled the White House, which issued a statement Wednesday condemning China’s harsh treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority after Bolton’s wrote that on two occasions Trump actually encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to use concentration camps for Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. According to Bolton, Trump also tried to persuade Xi to buy agricultural products to shore up his political base among farmers.

All week, legal experts have dismissed the possibility that the Trump administration could persuade a judge to stop the publication of the book. In an interview before the latest filing, Theodore Boutrous, a First Amendment expert at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said any effort to obtain an injunction would be “dead in the water immediately.”

“The book is out there,” Boutrous said. “Prior restraint would have no effect.”

Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany lashed at Bolton on Twitter Wednesday calling him a “weak dove of an author.”

John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, said unauthorized disclosures of classified information damage national security.

“Regardless of rank or position, every individual entrusted with access to our nation’s secrets has a legal duty and responsibility to protect classified information,” Ratcliffe said.

In a June 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bolton’s lawyer Chuck Cooper said the book went through “perhaps the most extensive and intensive prepublication review in NSC history.” Cooper accused the administration of using “national security as a pretext to censor” Bolton.

Cooper didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the injunction request.

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