Judge says US government’s lawsuit over John Bolton’s book can proceed

The Trump administration can move forward with its lawsuit against former national security adviser John Bolton over his tell-all book, a judge has ruled.

The US Justice Department alleges that Mr Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened contains classified information, and the government sued in June to try to prevent its release.

Though the book was published as scheduled, a suit accusing Mr Bolton of breaking contracts with the government by disclosing classified information and by failing to complete a required prepublication review can proceed, US district judge Royce Lamberth said in a 27-page opinion.

The Justice Department, the judge wrote, “plausibly pleads that Bolton breached those obligations”.

The book, which details Mr Bolton’s 17 months as Mr Trump’s national security adviser, contains descriptions of conversations with foreign leaders that could be seen as politically damaging to the president.

Those include accounts that Mr Trump tied providing military aid to Ukraine to that country’s willingness to conduct investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden and Mr Biden’s son Hunter, and that Mr Trump asked China’s President Xi Jinping to help his re-election prospects.

Judge Lamberth in June denied the government’s request for an injunction to block the book from being published, given that thousands of copies had already been distributed.

But he also scolded Mr Bolton for moving ahead with the book’s publication without waiting for formal, written authorisation that the book had been cleared.

Mr Bolton’s lawyers have said he worked for months for a White House career official to ensure that the manuscript was carefully screened and that he received verbal clearance last April that the book no longer contained classified material. But White House officials conducted a second review that they said identified classified information still in the book.

The case took a notable turn when a lawyer for that career official, Ellen Knight, submitted a statement that said that Ms Knight had advised National Security Council lawyers that she intended to clear the book for publication, but she was told to take no action and to tell Mr Bolton that the process was “ongoing”.

Weeks later, she learned that a White House official who she says had no previous classification experience had been instructed to conduct a second review of the manuscript.

That official, Michael Ellis, flagged hundreds of passages that he believed were still classified. Ms Knight disagreed with that conclusion and considered the re-review to be “fundamentally flawed”, according to the filing.