The White House has been furious in recent days, as former national security adviser John Bolton prepares to release his tell-all memoir regarding his time working for the Trump administration.
The book was believed to contain both some damning revelations and possibly some classified information, which made it the target of a lawsuit from the Department of Justice. The timing of the lawsuit appeared to trigger a leak of copies of the book to the press, as physical copies had already been shipped to warehouses.
So, now that the contents of the book are widely available, that DOJ lawsuit seems to be going up in flames.
The release of former national security adviser John Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, remains on track after a federal judge on Saturday rejected the Trump administration’s request to block its release.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the D.C. District Court said that Bolton may still be facing legal trouble and that because of a rush to print, it was likely his book contains classified information.
But with hundreds of thousands of copies of the book already out for sale, according to its publisher, the judge ruled that the administration’s efforts had come too late. “The damage is done,” he wrote in a 10-page opinion.
Judge Lambert certainly wasn’t too thrilled about the situation.
“Defendant Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States. He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability,” Lamberth concluded. “But these facts do not control the motion before the Court. The government has failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm.”
Bolton declined to voluntary testify before Congress late last year, allegedly awaiting a subpoena to do so, meaning that his memoirs should be experienced through the lens of a man who did’t really want to say all of this under oath.
