Lawyers for the Justice Department and John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, clashed Friday as a federal judge weighed a Trump administration …
Lawyers for the Justice Department and John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, clashed Friday as a federal judge weighed a Trump administration request to order Bolton to somehow claw back his memoir even though hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and distributed around the world.
In a hearing conducted by telephone because of the pandemic, David Morrell, a Justice Department lawyer, said Bolton was in “flagrant breach” of his obligation to complete a prepublication review designed to ensure his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” had no classified information. The onus was on Bolton to make an effort to fix the mess, Morrell argued.
“Deterrence matters,” Morrell told the judge overseeing the case, Royce Lamberth of the U. S. District Court of the District of Columbia. “There is a massive government interest that these agreements that are designed to protect classified information are not willy-nilly breached by disgruntled authors.”
But Charles Cooper, a lawyer for Bolton, called the request for an order that his client pull back the memoir “theater” both under the First Amendment and as a matter of practical reality. The Justice Department has also claimed that such an order could bind Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and bookstores.
The main elements of the book, an unflattering account of Trump’s conduct in office, have already been widely reported.
“This really isn’t a judicial proceeding,” Cooper said. “This does not have as its first purpose actually convincing you to order John Bolton to do something that he is utterly powerless to do and that you are therefore utterly powerless to force him to do.”
Lamberth made no ruling on the request for a restraining order from the bench, and he said that before making any decision he needed to hold a second, closed-door hearing with only the government to discuss the details of information in the book the administration now says are classified.
He held the closed hearing later Friday — in person because it involved discussion of classified information — according to a notation added to the case’s electronic docket.
