LEGAL
Trump launches the tell-all playbook on Bolton:
Lawsuits and Twitter threats
It's seen as unlikely the suit will stop publication
of John Bolton's book. But previous potentially explosive memoirs have sparked
news cycles only to burn out quickly.
By MERIDITH
MCGRAW and NATASHA BERTRAND
06/16/2020
05:54 PM EDT
Updated:
06/16/2020 10:46 PM EDT
The latest White House staffing drama is now playing
out over the pages of a book.
With
ex-national security adviser John Bolton’s tell-all tentatively set for release
next week, White House aides are anxiously waiting to see what, if any, damning
information is contained between the covers. In the meantime, they’ve activated
the typical Trump team playbook for ex-staffers who decide to spill the
administration’s innerworkings in print: lawsuits, character assassination on
Twitter and presidential haranguing.
On Tuesday
night, the Justice Department sued Bolton to delay the publication of his
memoirs, claiming the 592-page tome contains classified information, a charge
Bolton’s lawyer has denied. It’s a suit that seems unlikely to actually block
the book from coming out — early copies have already been distributed, and the
publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not named in the suit. But the move
escalates the monthslong cat-and-mouse game between Bolton and the White House,
with each side accusing the other of not acting in good faith.
The
question now becomes when — and whether — Bolton’s book will come out, and if
it will include any revelations that stick, fueling President Donald Trump’s
critics who are already going after him for his coronavirus response and
reaction to the police brutality protests. Previous memoirs have sparked raging
fires only to burn out quickly, dominating the news cycle for several days
before receding into the Trump presidency dustbin. In the end, the fight
between the two sides lingers more in the public conscience than the content of
the book itself. And Trump relishes a fight.
“Because of
the detail and Bolton’s seriousness, if this is a hit job everyone should be
concerned,” said one senior administration official, who requested anonymity to
talk about speculation surrounding the book. “But if it’s a more balanced,
honest discussion about policy there could be an upside to it.”
Realistically,
though, the official added, “In terms of it being a game changer, I feel like
people’s minds are made up. You agree with the policies the president has
implemented or not.”
The
lawsuit, a civil action filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia, alleges that Bolton risks “compromising national security by
publishing a book containing classified information — in clear breach of
agreements he signed as a condition of his employment.”
The lawsuit
asks the court to order Bolton to both complete a prepublication review process
that has stalled, while stopping the publication and dissemination of his book
“as currently drafted.”
It also
seeks an order “establishing a constructive trust on any profits obtained from
the disclosure or dissemination” of the book, effectively tying up any proceeds
Bolton would obtain from its release.
“We are
reviewing the government’s complaint, and will respond in due course,” Charles
Cooper, Bolton’s attorney said on Tuesday night. Bolton’s attorney has disputed
that the manuscript contains classified material.
Legal
experts pointed out that there is significant risk for Bolton, although it was
notable the publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not named in the lawsuit.
“The
government will now almost certainly get all of the money from sales of the
book, but if Bolton isn’t also criminally charged you have to believe he is
taking a victory lap in the end,” said national security lawyer Bradley Moss.
“The book will have been published and the embarrassing details will be
everywhere in the lead up to Election Day.”
One former
administration official noted that unlike some of the other current White House
memoir writers, Bolton had more access to the president and had a front-row
seat for some of the more controversial moments of his presidency, like a
meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Bolton was known to
take copious notes during his meetings on a legal pad, and officials have noted
his strong memory.
For a
president who demands loyalty, many of his former advisers and officials have
come out with critical books about their time at the White House.
Reality
television star-turned senior aide Omarosa Maningault Newman infuriated the
president when she wrote an account of her time in the West Wing, “Unhinged,”
that alleged Trump is a “racist, misogynist and bigot” who had used the
“n-word” repeatedly. Another memoir by a Trump aide, Cliff Sims, revealed some
embarrassing anecdotes about the president. The Trump campaign took legal
action against Newman and Sims for violating non-disclosure agreements, and
both were subjected to a flurry of angry Trump tweets. Trump called Newman a
“dog” and said Sims was “nothing more than a gofer.”
It’s
expected Bolton will face a similar response from the president. Already, he
sought to discredit his former national security adviser, questioning his
honesty.
“Maybe he’s
not telling the truth,” Trump said Monday when asked about the book. “He’s been
known not to tell the truth, a lot.”
Trump
allies have also taken to Twitter to attack Bolton. Campaign adviser Jason
Miller started using the hashtag #BookDealBolton on Twitter to paint the
conservative foreign policy firebrand as an opportunist who cashed in on his
access. Others have asked why Bolton purports to reveal about Trump’s foreign
policy dealings yet chose not to testify during impeachment hearings.
“Bolton’s
going to be in for a real rude awakening next week. He’s not going to get any
love from the right, but also I think he’s going to get a lot of really rude
awakening from the left who are asking why he saved all of this for a book?”
said one Trump adviser. “I don’t know where he’s going to find any audience
who’s going to want to run to embrace the guy.”
Just one
month after Bolton’s acrimonious departure from the administration, the
ex-adviser announced his plans to write a book about his experience in the
White House. According to the publisher, the book will reveal “chaos in the
White House, sure, but also assessments of major players, the president’s
inconsistent, scattershot decision-making process, and his dealings with allies
and enemies alike.”
“I am
hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that
wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” a press release said Bolton writes
in the book.
Bolton also
writes that House Democrats “committed impeachment malpractice” by only
focusing on the president’s phone call with the president of Ukraine when there
were "Ukraine-like transgressions ... across the full range of his foreign
policy.”
Despite the
bombshell allegations Bolton reportedly made in a draft of his manuscript, he
did not cooperate with impeachment proceedings and Senate Republicans failed to
subpoena him or other key witnesses.
For months,
the 592-page memoir has been the subject of a public spat between the White
House and the publisher, Simon & Schuster, as the National Security Council
reviewed the manuscript for classified information. Bolton’s attorney was
informed that the review process was completed in late April, but last week,
the NSC informed Bolton that further review was needed.
“In the
months leading up to the publication of ‘The Room Where It Happened,’ Bolton
worked in cooperation with the National Security Council to incorporate changes
to the text that addressed NSC concerns,” wrote Julia Prosser, the publicity
director for the publishing house. “The final, published version of this book
reflects those changes.”
The NSC’s
pre-publication review process is normally fairly straightforward, but Bolton’s
case has been complicated by its potentially politically explosive allegations
— including details about Trump’s alleged Ukraine-style blackmail threats to
other countries that were not documented during Trump’s impeachment trial.
Bolton’s
book also alleges that the president told him last August he wanted to keep
withholding military aid from Ukraine until officials there pledged to
investigate Joe and Hunter Biden — making Bolton the only first-hand witness to
that request, according to a New York Times account of the chapter. The story,
published in The New York Times, raised the pressure on the White House and the
GOP to clear Bolton’s book and allow him to testify in the impeachment trial.
Bolton ultimately refused to testify.
The suit
comes after Trump hinted earlier this week that the administration would be
taking Bolton to court, saying he would “consider every conversation with me as
president highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if
the book gets out, he’s broken the law.”
A Simon
& Schuster spokesman called the lawsuit “nothing more than the latest in a
long running series of efforts by the administration to quash publication of a
book it deems unflattering to the president.”
Upon
submitting the book for review in December, Cooper, Bolton’s attorney argued
that his client “carefully sought to avoid any discussion in the manuscript of
sensitive compartmentalized information ("SCI") or other classified
information.”
And Cooper
argued in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that the White House was merely
trying to suppress Bolton’s book “to prevent embarrassment” rather than to
protect national security secrets, pointing to “perhaps the most extensive and
intensive prepublication review in NSC history” in which Bolton and the NSC
spent almost four months, beginning in late January, “going through the nearly
500-page manuscript four times, often line by line.”
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Trump is trying to block publication of John
Bolton's book. What's he scared of?
Lloyd Green
The memoir reportedly depicts Trump as caring more
about re-election than US national security. No wonder he wants to quash it
Published
onWed 17 Jun 2020 07.30 BST
On Tuesday,
the Trump administration asked a federal judge to block publication of John
Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, the former national security adviser’s
twice-delayed kiss-and-tell memoir of life in the Trump White House. Last week,
Simon & Schuster, Bolton’s publisher, announced: “This is the book Donald
Trump doesn’t want you to read.”
They got
that one right. The book depicts “a president for whom getting re-elected was
the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the
nation”. Let that sink in.
To be sure,
the administration’s latest gambit should come as no surprise. Earlier in the
year, when the president’s acquittal in the Senate was still fresh and he was
blithely ignoring warnings about Covid-19, Trump was also demanding that Bolton
be criminally investigated. Hillary Clinton was not alone. For good measure,
Trump reportedly called Bolton a “traitor” to whomever would listen.
But beyond
personal animus, this is the fight Trump has been itching for. It’s chance to
silence his critics.
Two years
ago, the president and his minions threatened to block publication of Fire and
Fury, Michael Wolff’s scandalous account of the Trump White House, after the
Guardian ran excerpts before the book’s drop date. Back then it was simply a
brushback pitch, legal theatre of the absurd.
The warning
carried no mention of national security. Unsurprising, since Wolff’s book was
about Trump’s eco-system being a cross between the Lord of the Flies meets
Gossip Girl – hurt feelings, not state secrets.
Indeed,
publisher Henry Holt responded by bringing publication forward by four days.
The book, it claimed, was “an extraordinary contribution to our national
discourse”, which is highbrow speak for “shove it”.
No lawsuit
followed; casualties were minimal. Steve Bannon, another Trump White House
refugee, was served with a cease-and-desist letter warning him not to talk to
the press.
Heh heh.
The word on the street is that Bannon is now phoning in the plays to a
beleaguered Trump campaign. This time as a coach from the sidelines, not as a
quarterback on the field.
Sadly, the
ghosts of the Pentagon Papers are back. Once again, an unmoored administration
appears determined to use the courts to muzzle its critics.
During
Richard Nixon’s first term, the New York Times and the Washington Post
published excerpts of a secret official history of the Vietnam war, which made
clear that the US military effort in south-east Asia was doomed to failure.
American victory was never going to happen. When Nixon took the oath of office,
40,000 US troops already lay dead; another 20,000 would be killed on his watch.
Then as
now, the president raged and the first amendment to the constitution was
expected to take a back seat. Nixon and his allies sought to prevent the Post
and the Times from telling the truth. Fortunately, the government lost before
the US supreme court in a six-to-three decision.
In a
concurring and historic opinion, the late Hugo Black opined that a temporary
injunction obtained by the government should have been immediately vacated
without oral argument. Black wrote: “every moment’s continuance of the
injunctions … amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of
the first amendment.”
As for
relationship between the press, citizenry and those who govern, the concurrence
was equally emphatic: “The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press
would remain forever free to censure the government.”
To be sure,
the former Manhattan real estate developer has never been a fan of free speech
and a free press. Craving public mention should not be confused with respecting
free expression or the truth.
The blow-up
between Trump and Bolton also highlights divisions among conservatives. Trump
is no longer everyone’s favorite
Years ago,
Trump unsuccessfully sued the Times and Tim O’Brien, an investigative reporter,
because they had the temerity to question whether he was the billionaire he
claimed to be. More recently, Trump’s campaign claim that they were defamed by
the Post and the Times for publishing op-eds that concerned possible Russian
interference in the 2016 elections. Trump has also called for tougher libel
laws, sought to strip CNN’s Jim Acosta of his White House press pass, and
treated the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as a non-event.
The blow-up
between Trump and Bolton also highlights divisions among conservatives. Trump
is no longer everyone’s favorite.
Bolton’s
lawyer is Chuck Cooper, a former justice department colleague from the Reagan
administration. Cooper also represented Jeff Sessions, the former attorney
general, during the Mueller investigation, and Sessions is currently locked in
a battle for the Republican nomination for the Alabama Senate seat. Likewise,
Bolton’s spokeswoman, Sarah Tinsley, served in the Trump White House and holds
Republican credentials dating back to the Reagan years too.
On Monday,
Trump accused Bolton of peddling “highly classified information”, and branded
The Room Where It Happened “highly inappropriate”. As for Bolton the man, Trump
remarked, “Maybe he’s not telling the truth. He’s been known not to tell the
truth, a lot.”
Really?
Bolton’s the guy who keeps copious notes. And the president? He’s been
consistently trailing Joe Biden in the polls. Like the upcoming election,
Trump’s legal attack on Bolton will be one for the ages. Justice Black will
probably be watching from the great courtroom in the sky.
An attorney
in New York, Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s
1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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