Justice Department drops Trump-era criminal investigation and lawsuit related to John Bolton's book
The Justice Department closed its yearlong criminal investigation into Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton and dropped a lawsuit related to the publication of his book about the former president's diplomatic blunders. The Trump-era criminal investigation had examined whether Bolton's book illegally disclosed national security information, while the lawsuit had sought to wrest Bolton's copyright for publishing his book without the full approval of the administration.
The end of the proceedings marks another closure by the Biden administration of politically charged cases and investigations of Trump's political opponents. In recent weeks, the Justice Department has abandoned or shifted its focus on various issues that the Trump-era department had pursued, and announced that its now Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco is looking at "potentially problematic issues" in addition to policies that the new administration might want to change.
The Justice Department drops these cases within a year of the urgent lawsuit against Bolton.
John Bolton told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday in "The Situation Room" that his book "did go through a pre-publication review process" and that it "was approved by the team of experts who reviewed it, hard." .
“Look, I think this was a vindication of the opinion that I have had from the beginning that Trump used the issue of classified information purely as a pretext to try to suppress a book that he did not want to come out before the November elections. 2020 ", he said about the withdrawal of the cases.
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Pressed on whether he believed the legal proceedings were some kind of retaliation, Bolton said: "As is the case with almost everything involving Trump, it was all about Trump and his political fortunes."
Bolton's attorney, Charles Cooper, applauded President Joe Biden's Justice Department for ending all legal proceedings against Trump's adviser-turned-political enemy. Cooper said the cases appeared to be politically motivated.
"We held from the outset that neither action was justifiable, because they were initiated only as a result of President Trump's politically motivated order to prevent the publication of the ambassador's book before the 2020 election," Cooper said in a statement.
"By ending these proceedings without sanctioning Ambassador Bolton in any way or limiting his earnings from the book, the Justice Department has tacitly acknowledged that President Trump and his White House officials acted illegitimately," Cooper added.
The book, published in June 2020, boasted a series of outrageous allegations, including that Trump requested Chinese help to win the 2020 presidential election, that he had argued that Venezuela is part of the United States, that he had casually offered to intervening in the criminal justice system for foreign leaders and being mocked by his own senior officials behind his back.
Early in the Biden administration, Justice Department officials began discussing ways to end Bolton's criminal investigation, according to people briefed on the matter.
Career attorneys had long considered civil and criminal cases tainted by political overtones due to the involvement of senior White House officials and the former president's public statements.
Prosecutors also realized, according to those briefed on the matter, that they probably wouldn't be able to use the testimony of what would have been their star witness, Michael Ellis, a former White House national security attorney who played a role in triage. retroactive parts of Bolton's book and which the former president tried to impose as general counsel in the National Security Agency (NSA, for its acronym in English). The Biden administration suspended the NSA appointment and he became the subject of an internal Pentagon investigation before he finally resigned.
Bolton's book, a politically damaging moment for Trump during an election year, is one of the episodes that drew major criticism about the politicization of the intelligence community and the Justice Department by the Trump administration.
Trump-era effort to stop John Bolton's book
Former Attorney General William Barr had signed a White House petition to sue to stop the publication of Bolton's book in an unusual act just days before its release.
In line with his hands-off approach outside his political circle, Barr sent then-Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to discuss with department attorneys how they should file the lawsuit against John Bolton, a person familiar with the matter previously told CNN. handling the case.
The lawyers advised that an attempt to stop the publication of the book was unsuccessful. But his concerns were ignored and Barr signed the lawsuit, the person said. That part of the lawsuit, which was intended to stop publication, failed because the book was already in the hands of bookstores.
Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Bolton could seek evidence about the classification process surrounding his book in the event of bad faith decision making by the White House and the targeted intelligence community. to protect Trump politically.
That decision had put the Justice Department in a potentially difficult situation, as the door had been opened for Bolton's legal team to push to interview people close to the president under oath.
A former government official who specializes in classification had stepped forward last fall to allege that the Trump White House mishandled the classification around the book, saying she believed she had been forced to quit her job out of anger. from the then president to Bolton.
The lawyer, Ellen Knight, wondered "how it could be appropriate that an apolitical designed process has been requisitioned by political appointees for an apparently political purpose," her lawyers wrote of her work on revising the Bolton manuscript, which she largely approved for publication before lawyers close to Trump intervened, blocking its approval.
Generally, if a writer who has worked for the government does not get full approval before a book is published, the Justice Department can sue after the fact to try to collect the writer's earnings.
Bolton could lose millions if this were the case.
The Justice Department, in the lawsuit trial, had disclosed that the Trump administration was also investigating him for criminal offenses.
