National Security Adviser John Bolton listens as U.S. President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 9, 2018.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
A federal judge Saturday ruled that John Bolton, one of President Donald Trump’s former national security advisers, can go forward with the publication of his memoir, rejecting the administration’s request for an order that he try to pull the book back even though it had already been printed and distributed around the world, and saying it was too late for such an order to succeed.
“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo,” wrote Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia.
But in a 10-page opinion, Lamberth also suggested that Bolton may be in serious jeopardy of forfeiting his $2 million advance, as the Justice Department has separately requested — and that he could be prosecuted for allowing the book to be published before receiving final notice that a prepublication review process to ensure it had no classified information was complete.
“Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” Lamberth wrote. “He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability. But these facts do not control the motion before the court. The government has failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm.”
The main elements of the book, “The Room Where It Happened,” an unflattering account of Trump’s conduct in office, have already been widely reported.
Lamberth issued the ruling after holding a public hearing Friday about the government’s request in which he had strongly signaled that he believed the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction had come too late to ensure that any classified information in the book would remain secret.
Later Friday, he held a closed-door hearing with government lawyers to discuss their contention that classified information remains in the manuscript — including an exceptionally restricted kind that could reveal closely held intelligence sources and methods — even though the National Security Council’s top official for prepublication review had told Bolton that she was satisfied with the edits he had made at her request.
The judge wrote that after viewing classified declarations and discussing them in the closed hearing, he was “persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”