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 on 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.”
“Under federal law and the nondisclosure agreements your client signed as a condition for gaining access to classified information, the manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information,” she wrote.
The news of the letter broke Wednesday after it was obtained by both CNN and Fox News. It also came on the same day President Donald Trump tore into Bolton on Twitter about his upcoming “nasty & untrue” book, “The Room Where It Happened.”
The book, due out in March, details Bolton’s time at the White House and has already earned an icy reaction from those who think it is unseemly for him to capitalize on his experience in a book but not testify during Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate.