Trump threatens ex-adviser John Bolton over tell-all book
June 16, 2020
US President Donald Trump said on Monday that his former national security adviser, John Bolton, could face criminal liability if he doesn't halt the publication of his new book that is expected to provide an insider account of the Trump administration.
"I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out he's broken the law," Trump said. "That's called criminal liability. That's a big thing," he said.
Bolton, who served as Trump's national security adviser for about 18 months, is a controversial figure in Washington. He is a Republican policymaker known for his hawkish stance on foreign affairs. Bolton was fired by Trump in September 2019 over simmering differences on a range of foreign policy issues, most notably North Korea and Afghanistan.
'Addicted to chaos'
In the book, titled "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," Bolton writes that almost every decision by Trump was motivated by domestic politics, and that he committed impeachable offenses even beyond the charges related to Ukraine.
"I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations," Bolton writes in the book, according to a statement by the publishers, Simon and Schuster.
The book describes Trump as "a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government," the statement said.
Pre-publication review
Trump has accused Bolton of not completing the clearance process required for a book by former government officials who had access to sensitive information. While Trump admitted he had not read the book, he said the problem of revealing conversations with the president "becomes even worse if he lies about the conversation, which I understand he might have in some cases."
"We'll see what happens. They're in court or they'll soon be in court," Trump said.
US Attorney General William Barr also raised concerns over the pre-publication review process, and added that the Trump administration was "trying to get them to go through the process and make the necessary deletions of classified information."
Bolton's lawyer Chuck Cooper has contradicted these statements, saying that his client had painstakingly worked with classifications specialists at the White House National Security Council to ensure classified material is not published.
"This is a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton, in violation of his constitutional right to speak on matters of the utmost public importance,''according to Cooper. "This attempt will not succeed, and Mr. Bolton's book will be published June 23."
adi/sri (AP, Reuters)