Bolton Scores Pyrrhic Victory in Court Ruling on Trump Book

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A federal judge excoriated former national security advisor John Bolton for exposing the U.S. to harm with his tell-all memoir about President Donald Trump but said it’s too late to issue an order that would stop publication of the book.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington on Saturday rejected the Justice Department’s last-ditch attempt to block the publication on national security grounds, paving the way for “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” to go on sale June 23.

In his judgment, Lamberth slammed Bolton for gambling with national security and going ahead with the book before it cleared pre-publication review by the Trump administration.

“He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability,” the judge wrote. “But these facts do not control the motion before the Court. The government has failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm.”

President Trump took to Twitter soon after the announcement, and said Bolton must “pay a very big price” for his actions.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued Bolton for breach of contract, claiming he had pulled out of the pre-publication review process that he agreed to undergo when he got his security clearance. The next day, the government escalated its response, seeking an injunction to stop the book’s publication, even though detailed excerpts were already appearing in major newspapers and some 200,000 copies had been shipped to booksellers.

Horse Bolted

Bolton argued the government was stalling on the review to ensure the book didn’t come out before November and hurt the president’s chances at reelection. The former NSA advisor also said the publication is protected under the First Amendment.

The judge ruled that the government hadn’t carried its burden of establishing that an injunction would prevent “irreparable injury,” a requirement for securing such a restraining order.

“By the looks of it, the horse is not just out of the barn — it is out of the country,” Lamberth wrote.

But as a breach of contract case, the judge noted that the government is likely to win as it goes to the next stage, putting Bolton at risk of losing a $2 million book advance and any royalties from sales

According to reviews and published excerpts, Bolton’s book paints an unflattering portrait of the White House, describing Trump as ignorant of basic foreign policy facts and motivated largely by political self-interest. In one passage that has been widely reported, Bolton wrote that Trump urged the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to buy agricultural products from the United States because it would help the Trump campaign build political support in rural states.

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

‘Unprecedented Decision’

Ellis, who purportedly discovered classified material late in the pre-publication review process, didn’t have training on how to identify such material until June, according to Bolton.

But Bolton’s move to go ahead with publishing the book was an “unprecedented decision by an author to submit a manuscript for pre-publication revue but then to bail out of that process before it’s completed,” government lawyer David Morrell argued at a hearing on Friday. “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.”

Under questioning from the judge, Morrell said he wasn’t aware whether the president had personally directed intelligence officials to designate any material from the book as classified.

“There are certain passages in this book that will damage the national security of the United States,” Morrell said. “These NDAs aren’t just bureaucratic contrivances. They serve an important function,” he said, referring to a non-disclosure agreement Bolton signed.

Damage Done

The judge slammed Bolton’s conduct in his ruling, saying “the damage is done” and there’s no returning to the status quo after his unilateral action.

“In taking it upon himself to publish his book without securing final approval from national intelligence authorities, Bolton may indeed have caused the country irreparable harm,” Lamberth wrote. “But in the Internet age, even a handful of copies in circulation could irrevocably destroy confidentiality.”

All week, legal experts had 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.

The case is U.S. v. Bolton, 20-cv-01580, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

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