Trump administration seeks emergency order to block Bolton's memoir

The Trump administration has made an aggressive last-ditch attempt to block the release of John Bolton’s bombshell book, in which the former national security adviser writes that the US president offered favors to dictators and asked China to help him with his 2020 re-election.

On Wednesday night, the justice department sought an emergency order from a judge to block the publication of Bolton’s memoir, after explosive excerpts were printed by various news organizations.

This latest move comes after the administration filed a civil suit against Bolton on Tuesday. The emergency temporary restraining order filed Wednesday, which seeks to stop the release of his book on 23 June, is unlikely to succeed, legal experts said, especially since copies had already been distributed to booksellers and journalists.

In a statement, Bolton’s publisher Simon and Schuster called the restraining order “a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility. Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.’’

Bolton’s book accuses the president of being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions.

According to Bolton, who was a national security adviser for a 17-month period, Trump pleaded with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during a 2019 summit to help his re-election prospects, which mirrored the president’s efforts to solicit political help from Ukraine.

In one instance, according to Bolton, the two world leaders were discussing hostility to China in the US when “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”

“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

Bolton wrote that he believes that Congress should have expanded the scope of its impeachment inquiry to these other incidents.

Trump has derided Bolton, claiming that he is breaking the law by moving forward with plans to publish a book that contains classified information.

In its legal actions, the administration’s primary argument is that Bolton breached his non-disclosure agreement and failed to see through a process to make sure his book was properly sanitized of sensitive information, according to Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in matters relating to national security.

The justice department’s latest effort to block publication is a “clever but doomed effort to circumvent existing judicial case law restricting its authority to censor the media”, Moss told the Guardian. “They are only seeking the injunction against Bolton but are then using an obscure rule of civil procedure to argue that the court can also enjoin the publisher and all commercial resellers of the books.”

In reality, little can be done to stop the book from getting out at this stage, Moss noted: “The media has copies already. The book is coming out.”

Federal prosecutors were reported on Wednesday to be mulling criminal charges against Bolton.

The Associated Press contributed reporting