White House Accused of Improperly Politicizing Review
of John Bolton’s Book
The
account by a former National Security Council official also implied that the
Justice Department may have told a court that the book contains classified
information and opened a criminal investigation based on false pretenses.
By Michael
S. Schmidt and Charlie Savage
·
Sept. 23, 2020Updated 3:17
p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — White House aides
improperly intervened to prevent a manuscript by President Trump’s former
national security adviser John R. Bolton from becoming public, a career
official said in a letter filed in court on Wednesday, accusing them of
making false assertions that he had revealed classified material and suggesting
that they retaliated when she refused to go along.
The disclosures by the official who
oversaw the book’s prepublication review, Ellen Knight, were the latest a
series of
accounts by
current and former executive branch officials as the election nears accusing
the president and
his aides of putting his personal and political goals ahead
of the public interest and an evenhanded application of the rule of law.
In an extraordinary 18-page document, a
lawyer for Ms. Knight portrays the Trump administration as handling its
response to the book in bad faith. Her account implied that the Justice
Department may have told a court that the book contains classified information
— and opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Bolton — based on false
pretenses.
She also said an aide
to Mr. Trump also “instructed her to temporarily withhold any response” to a
request from Mr. Bolton to review a chapter on Mr. Trump’s dealings with
Ukraine so it could be released during the impeachment trial, wrote Ms.
Knight’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein.
He said that his client had determined
in April that Mr. Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” no longer
contained any classified information, but the “apolitical process” was then
“commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose” to go
after Mr. Bolton. The actions she was asked to take were “unprecedented in her
experience,” the letter said.
Ms. Knight said that political
appointees repeatedly asked her to sign a declaration to use against Mr. Bolton
that made false assertions. She said that after her refusal, she was reassigned
from the White House despite earlier expectations that she would transition to
a permanent position there.
“She had never
previously been asked to take the above-described measures, and she has never
heard that predecessors in her position ever received such instructions in the
course of their prepublication reviews,” the letter said.
READ
THE LETTER
Ms. Knight’s account of political influence in reviewing Mr.
Bolton’s book.
The Justice Department
defended the review process and White House’s decision to deem the materials in
Mr. Bolton’s book classified, citing sworn statements by national security
officials. “The publication of a memoir by a former national security adviser,
right after his departure, is an unprecedented action, and it is not surprising
that National Security Council staff would pay close attention to ensure that
the book does not contain the release of classified information,” said a
department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec.
A lawyer for Mr. Bolton, Charles J.
Cooper, declined to comment on the specifics of the letter but said his client
had not asked Ms. Knight to disclose her account of events and that he had
received a copy of the letter unexpectedly on Tuesday evening.
The document was an extraordinary twist
in the legal saga surrounding Mr. Bolton’s book. The Trump administration
unsuccessfully sought to block distribution of the book this year after it was
already printed, claiming despite Ms. Knight’s assessment that it contained
large amounts of classified information. It is moving to seize his $2 million
advance and has opened
a criminal investigation, threatening charges for unauthorized disclosures of
secrets.
But the letter called into question the
premise underlying those efforts — that the book contains any classified
information.
Mr. Wainstein recounted a series of
irregularities that he said were unlike any other prepublication review Ms.
Knight had handled in her two years working at the National Security Council.
Ms. Knight, after extensive work with
Mr. Bolton to change his draft to eliminate classified information, had told
his team informally in April that it no longer had any unpublishable material.
But the White House never sent a formal letter saying the process was over and
political appointees in the White House directed Ms. Knight not to communicate
with them in writing about the book.
In June, as the delay dragged on, Mr.
Bolton and Simon & Schuster published the book, arguing that Ms. Knight’s
informal assurance fulfilled the legal commitment he had undertaken, as a
condition of receiving his security clearance, to submit future writings about
his job to prepublication review.
But the White House
had by then proceeded to have a politically appointed lawyer — Michael Ellis, a
former aide to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and a close
Trump ally — conduct his own review of the book.
Mr. Ellis had no training in the task
at the time — he went through it after he completed his review — and pronounced
the book replete with still-classified information. The Justice Department
adopted that view in court in seeking to block Mr. Bolton from distributing the
book.
Mr. Ellis was wrong, Mr. Wainstein
wrote. Rather than evaluating the book by prepublication review standards for
writings by a private citizen, he essentially treated the manuscript as a
government document being subject to a classification review.
The two are very different, the letter
explained, on matters like discussing a phone call between a president and a
foreign leader. Mr. Bolton’s book contains numerous accounts of such
discussions.
While an official record of that call would
be presumptively classified, if the White House press secretary has disclosed
the call’s existence and some its details, the prepublication review standards
would not flag a manuscript’s similar discussion of the call as classified and
unpublishable.
“Mr. Ellis failed to analyze whether
the information he marked as classified was still, in fact, classified and
subject to redaction,” Mr. Wainstein wrote.
Classification determinations are
typically left to career experts, rather than White House lawyers, to keep
prepublication reviews apolitical, said Joshua Geltzer, a former National
Security Council lawyer under the Obama administration who worked on such
issues.
“The letter strikes
me as alleging a very serious infection of the prepublication process by
political actors to the detriment of the classification experts who, in any
normal administration, would handle these matters based on their experience,”
Mr. Geltzer said.
The letter also called into question a
statement made by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the
District of Columbia, who rejected the Justice Department’s request in June to
block distribution of the already-printed book. Judge Lamberth wrote in his
ruling that the book appeared to contain large amounts of classified
information and suggested that Mr. Bolton was likely to face civil and possibly
criminal penalties.
But the letter noted that Judge
Lamberth considered only Mr. Ellis’s review and the assertions from
intelligence officials that the book contained classified information, not the
review led by Ms. Knight.
The letter also describes a pressure
campaign that Mr. Trump’s appointees mounted against Ms. Knight to get her to
admit error and say the book still had classified information, as they prepared
their request for a judicial order blocking it.
Politically appointed White House
officials — led by Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel — called in
Ms. Knight for a Saturday meeting in June and challenged her on why she had
signed off on large amounts of material that Mr. Ellis claimed was classified,
the letter said. By her account, she was able to explain why he was wrong about
everything, frustrating them.
“It was clear to Ms. Knight that they
were trying to get her to admit that she and her team had missed something or
made a mistake, which mistake could then be used to support their argument to
block publication,” it said. “To their consternation, Ms. Knight was able to
explain the clear and objective reasoning behind her team’s decision-making as
to each of the challenged passages.”
In the coming days, the letter
continued, White House and Justice Department political appointees pressured
her over 18 hours of meetings to sign an affidavit they could submit to a court
for the litigation against Mr. Bolton that purported to describe her role in
the process but was worded in a way that would support their narrative that her
review was subpar and had left classified information in the book. She refused.
Ms. Knight — who was
nearing the end of a two-year detail from the National Archives and Records
Administration to the National Security Council — had expected up to that point
that she would transition to a permanent position at the National Security
Council. However, following the dispute over the Bolton book, she was instead
sent back to the National Archives last month.
The allegations in Ms. Knight’s letter
could dominate a hearing scheduled for Thursday in the civil dispute between
the government and Mr. Bolton.
Mr. Bolton’s book presents an unflattering
account of Mr. Trump’s conduct in office, including evidence supporting the
accusations that prompted his impeachment: that he abused his power over the
nation’s foreign policy to try to obtain personal political benefits. The
Republican-led Senate acquitted him of the charges.
Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Bolton of
lying while openly pressing the Justice Department to
prosecute his former aide for spilling secrets.
In her account of the pressure from
Trump aides, Ms. Knight asked the lawyers why they were so insistent on
pursuing legal action and speculated that it was “because the most powerful man
in the world said that it needed to happen.”
“Several registered their agreement
with that diagnosis of the situation,” the letter said.
