- White House balks, again, at Bolton plan to publish memoir By ERIC TUCKER and AAMER MADHANI June 10, 2020 WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has told former national security adviser John Bolton that the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir still contains classified material and could present a national security threat.
- That senior official was John Bolton. Bolton’s new memoir of his 15 months as Donald Trump’s national security adviser comes out tomorrow, over the objections of an administration alleging.
Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies.
Overview
The result is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when 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.
He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. “The differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning,” writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships, made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place.
Bolton’s account starts with his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria’s chemical attack on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk—all the while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer amount of work—and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description, try something else.”
The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there—from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has told former national security adviser John Bolton that the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir still contains classified material and could present a national security threat. But Bolton’s lawyer said Wednesday that publication will go ahead as planned on June 23 and he accused the White House of unfairly trying to keep it on ice.
John Eisenberg, a deputy White House counsel, wrote Bolton attorney Charles Cooper this week raising concerns that the manuscript for “The Room Where It Happened” still “contains classified information.”
“As we advised your client when he signed the nondisclosure agreements, and as he should be well as aware as Assistant to the President for the National Security Affairs in this administration, the unauthorized disclosure of classified information could be exploited by a foreign power, thereby causing significant harm to the national security of the United States,” Eisenberg wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
Smartdisk sound cards & media devices driver. Eisenberg added that Bolton would be provided with necessary redactions from the White House no later than June 19.
Cooper, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said White House lawyers have slow-walked the process because “President Trump simply doesn’t want John Bolton to publish his book.”
“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 import,” Cooper wrote. “This attempt will not succeed, and Mr. Bolton’s book will be published June 23.”
Leaked passages from the manuscript roiled Washington in the midst of Trump’s impeachment trial. Included was the revelation that Bolton said Trump told him he was conditioning the release of military aid to Ukraine on whether Ukraine’s government would help investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Topstar driver. The younger Biden was paid by a gas company in Ukraine to serve as a board member.
John Bolton Memoir Review
Bolton initially submitted the transcript as required to Ellen Knight, the National Security Council’s senior director for prepublication review of materials written by NSC personnel, on Dec. 30, according to Cooper.
“What followed was perhaps the most extensive and intensive prepublication review in NSC history,” Cooper wrote. “Mr. Bolton and Ms. Knight spent almost four months going through the nearly 500-page manuscript four times, often line by line.”
Cooper said that at the end of the ordeal, Knight told Bolton on April 27 “that’s the last edit I really have to provide for you.”
“Yet when Mr. Bolton asked when he would receive the letter confirming the book was cleared, Ms. Knight cryptically replied that her ‘interaction’ with unnamed others in the White House about the book had ‘been very delicate’ and that there were ‘some internal process considerations to work through,”’ Cooper wrote.
Then Bolton received the letter on Monday that White House concerns about classified material in the book remain.
John Bolton Memoir Download
The White House declined comment Wednesday.