Former national security adviser John Bolton hopes his forthcoming memoir about his time in the White House is “not suppressed,” he said Monday.
During a talk at Duke University, Yahoo News reported that Bolton discussed his book “The Room Where It Happened,” slated for release on March 17, detailing his time working for President Donald Trump. The book describes his interaction with the president over Ukraine and other topics such as nuclear proliferation in North Korea. “I hope it’s not suppressed,” Bolton said. “This is an effort to write history, and I did it the best I can. We’ll have to see what comes out of the censorship.”
He also said, according to Yahoo News, “I say things in the manuscript about what [Trump] said to me. I hope they become public someday. He tweets but I can’t talk about it. How fair is that?”
In January, a White House official sent a letter to John Bolton’s lawyer instructing the former national security adviser not to publish his forthcoming memoir because it contains “significant amounts of classified information.”
The letter from a National Security Council official Ellen J. Knight dated Jan. 23 thanked Bolton and his team for sending them a copy of the manuscript. However, she wrote that “Based on our preliminary review, the manuscript appears to contain significant amounts of classified information.” Knight said some of the information was “top secret,” meaning it “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security.”