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| Tia Dufour/White House |
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to order Bolton to ask his publisher to delay the publication of the book until they comply with the review. In addition, it asks the federal judge to require Bolton to put any profit he receives from the book into a trust for the benefit of the government.
Bolton “had negotiated a book deal allegedly worth about $2 million and had drafted a 500-plus-page manuscript rife with classified information, which he proposed to release to the world,” the Justice Department claimed in a federal lawsuit against Mr. Bolton.
The White House National Security Council "has determined that the manuscript in its present form contains certain passages - some up to several paragraphs in length - that contain classified national security information," the lawsuit claimed.
If published, it "would cause irreparable harm, because the disclosure of instances of classified information in the manuscript reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States," per the lawsuit.
Bolton’s publisher said the book would show an inside look into the White House during his time as national security advisor until he was fired in September 2019. "I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations," the book read, according to material provided by Simon & Schuster.
On Monday, Trump claimed the book had classified information in the book, and had not complied with a review process needed for any book written by former government officials who had access to classified information.