Justice Department seeks court order to block release of book by former national security adviser John Bolton

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department filed a suit Tuesday seeking to block the release of a book by former White House national security adviser John Bolton, asserting that his much-anticipated memoir contains classified material.

The moves sets up legal showdown between President Donald Trump and the longtime conservative foreign policy hand, who alleges in his book that the president committed "Ukraine-like transgressions" in a number of foreign policy decisions, according his publisher.

"The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," is due to go on sale June 23, and has already been shipped to distribution centers across the country.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, accuses Bolton of breach of contract and asks the court to prohibit him from disclosing any information in the book or releasing it in any form.

Bolton's attorney has said that the memoir does not contain any classified material. According to his publisher, Simon & Schuster, the former national security adviser spent months revising his manuscript at the request of the White House.

But Trump told reporters Monday that it was "highly inappropriate" for Bolton to write the book.

"I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified," he said. "So that would mean that, if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he's broken the law and I would think that he would have criminal problems. I hope so."

"Maybe he's not telling the truth," added the president, speaking at a White House roundtable on protecting senior citizens during the pandemic. "He's been known not to tell the truth, a lot."

Attorney General William Barr concurred, telling reporters, "We don't believe Bolton has gone through the process" required to clear books by government officials on topics of national security.

"He hasn't completed the process," Barr said.

Legal experts said they believe the White House will face an uphill battle, given long-standing precedents showing courts are averse to preemptively blocking publication of books on political topics.

"American courts very rarely issue prior restraints against publication and that's because prior restrains suppress speech before it occurs and almost always the requests are seen as too broad," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Jaffer said that if the White House wants to claim that presidential conversations are all classified, that could force the courts to weigh such a claim.

"It is true that the president has authority to make classification decisions," Jaffer said. "But there are limits" and the courts could use this opportunity to define them, he said.

Last week, the White House warned Bolton that his book needs further revision to comply with a review process required of government employees writing about national security and intelligence issues.

Bolton's lawyer, Charles Cooper, has said that Bolton cooperated White House vetting of the manuscript since last December, when the manuscript was first submitted to the National Security Council for review.

The 592-page book is expected to go into detail about Trump's decision-making process, his warring advisers and the president's engagement on a range of foreign policy decisions, from Ukraine and Venezuela to North Korea and Iran.

''I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations,'' Bolton writes, according a description released Friday by Simon & Schuster.

The veteran GOP foreign policy adviser also argues in the book that House Democrats "committed impeachment malpractice" by focusing their inquiry on Ukraine, according to the publisher.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that an early draft said Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine as a way to pressure Ukraine's newly elected president to launch an inquiry of Democrats, including the activities of former vice president Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. That news broke just as the Senate was considering articles of impeachment against the president.

On June 10, Bolton was notified by the White House that it would provide him with a new, redacted manuscript by June 19, four days before the book is to go on sale.

A letter to Bolton from John Eisenberg, a deputy White House counsel, noted that the former national security adviser signed a nondisclosure agreement when he began his White House service in April 2018.

"The unauthorized disclosure of classified information could be exploited by a foreign power, thereby causing significant harm to the national security of the United States," Eisenberg wrote.

In response, Cooper said his client scrupulously complied with national security vetting requirements. He and Bolton have said from the outset that the book did not contain classified material.

Bolton, who served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, worked with the White House for months to vet the manuscript for national security concerns, Cooper said.

"Simon & Schuster is fully supportive of Ambassador Bolton's First Amendment right to tell the story of his time in the Trump White House," Julia Prosser, vice president and director of publicity for the publishing house, said in a statement last week.

Prosser noted that Bolton took care to make sure the book, which was originally scheduled to be published in March, did not endanger national security.

"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," she said in a prepared statement. "The final, published version of this book reflects those changes."

- - -

The Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu and Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.