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.”