Its request for an order blocking the publication of the former official’s memoir is the latest in a series of acts by the department to shield the president’s friends or pursue his critics.
Hours before the Justice Department asked a judge to order President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton to halt publication of his memoir, senior department lawyers and the White House Counsel’s Office were still debating whether to take that step, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
The Trump administration had already filed a lawsuit seeking to seize Mr. Bolton’s $2 million payday because he did not complete a government review process to screen out any classified information from his manuscript. But some officials feared it was far too late to block the book’s distribution, so any attempt was doomed to fail and would make the government look inept.
Mr. Trump, however, was making clear that he wanted an aggressive response — even suggesting Mr. Bolton should face criminal charges. Ultimately, the Justice Department moved forward late Wednesday with the attention-grabbing request for an order blocking further distribution of a book that has already been printed and is in the hands of reviewers, reporters and store owners. A federal judge granted the department’s request for a hearing on Friday to discuss its motion.
While the extent of Attorney General William P. Barr’s personal involvement remains unclear, the aggressive move is the latest instance in which the Justice Department under his watch has appeared to wield its law enforcement power in ways that align with Mr. Trump’s views of perceived political allies or adversaries.
The department’s request for an order that Mr. Bolton stop publication of the book seemed “obviously pointless” because it had already been printed and distributed, said Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration. But it was hard to know from the outside whether it took that step for legitimate reasons or just to harass Mr. Bolton, Mr. Goldsmith said.
“The problem of Trump’s incessantly indicating he wants to use law enforcement to hurt his enemies is it means invariably that any move the D. O. J. takes related to his political enemies looks like retaliation, whether it is or not,” Mr. Goldsmith said, adding, “Especially in light of the pointlessness of the request for an injunction, it’s natural to view it as just the department carrying Trump’s water.”
Some of the department’s other interventions that align with Mr. Trump’s preferences have been defensive. A federal judge has accused Mr. Barr of using his early access to the report on the Trump-Russia investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to torque public understanding of its contents in a way that made it seem better for the president than it was.
Mr. Barr overruled prosecutors to seek a more lenient sentence for Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s friend and ally, for sabotaging a congressional investigation into Russia’s election interference, and decided to seek dismissal of the case against Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, even though he had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.
