Published 10:04 IST, June 17th 2020
Trump tries to block his ex-NSA John Bolton's memoir 'The Room Where It Happened'
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit on June 16 against the former national security adviser John R. Bolton to try to delay publication of a memoir.
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit on June 16 against the current President's former national security adviser John R. Bolton to try to delay publication of a highly anticipated memoir about his brief tenure in the White House. The allegation is that the book contained classified information that would compromise national security if it became public. The book, titled as, “The Room Where It Happened” is set for release on June 23 but the administration officials have repeatedly warned Bolton against publishing it.
Bolton seems quite assured, however, that he has precedent on his side:
Trump administration sues Bolton
Trump said Monday that his former national security adviser, John Bolton, could face a “criminal problem” if he doesn't halt plans to publish a new book that describes allegedly 'scattershot, sometimes dangerous, decision-making by a president focused only on getting re-elected'. The president accused Bolton of not completing a pre-publication review to make sure the book does not contain classified material.
In the delay of its publishing, “The Room Where It Happened” has apparently grown longer. It was originally listed as 528 pages, but is now 576 pages, according to the retailer and publisher web sites. The publisher said that Bolton has coverered an array of topics — chaos in the White House but also assessments of major players, the president’s inconsistent decision-making process, and his dealings with allies and enemies alike, from China, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
The following is the book's description, as per Amazon:
As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves.
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.
Updated 10:04 IST, June 17th 2020