The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to prevent former National Security Adviser, John Bolton from publishing a new book about his time at the White House, BBC reports.
According to the US President, Donald Trump, Bolton will be breaching a contract he signed with his administration by doing so and will also be risking the exposure of classified information if he released the book.
“I will consider every conversation with me as President highly classified.
“So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law and I would think he would have criminal problems,” Trump said.
The lawsuit which was filed on Tuesday evening in Washington, DC, federal court, alleges that Bolton’s book was “rife with classified information,” and that Bolton backed out of an ongoing White House vetting process for the book that he’d been obligated to do as a result of agreements he’d signed.
“Bolton struck a bargain with the United States as a condition of his employment in one of the most sensitive and important national security positions in the United States Government and now wants to renege on that bargain by unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public,” prosecutors wrote.
The prosecutors also claim Bolton will be revealing National security information with the release of the book scheduled for June 23.
However, the non-profit American Civil Liberties Union has said that “any Trump administration efforts to stop John Bolton’s book from being published are doomed to fail”.
Also, Bolton’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, said they were looking through the lawsuit and “will respond in due course”.
Recall that President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had asked John Bolton, his national security adviser, to resign, citing strong differences of opinion with his hawkish assistant.
According to him, Bolton was fired for allegedly pressuring the US to go into a war with Iran and North Korea.
