They’re not likely to succeed, but the real goal is to seize any money he makes.
The Justice Department is suing to try to block John Bolton, former national security adviser, from releasing his White House tell-all The Room Where It Happened.
It’s extremely unlikely they’ll stop the book’s release, which is slated for next week, but what they’re really going after is the money Bolton will make off of it.
The Room Where It Happened purports to document the inner operations of President Donald Trump’s White House from spring 2018 to fall 2019, when Bolton served. The Amazon summary of the book says Bolton saw a president who cared only about getting reelected regardless of whatever impact it had on national security. He argues that the dealings with Ukraine (trying to make government officials dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden) that led to Trump’s failed impeachment were not isolated: „Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.“
The summary is also full of Boltonesque whining that Trump’s foreign policy was all about making friends with foreign leaders and not nearly enough saber rattling, so we can fully expect his criticism of Trump to partly revolve around Bolton not getting the harshly punitive or even militaristic responses to conflicts with countries like North Korea or Iran that he wants.
But that’s not really what’s at issue here. Because of Bolton’s role in government, there’s a lengthy review process that requires that the book’s contents be scrutinized before publication so as not to reveal classified information. This is part of a binding agreement that all federal employees with high-level access to secret information have to sign. Violate the agreement and the feds have the power to take former employees to court to demand all the profits the book makes.
