President Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, is under investigation by the Department of Justice, for the possibility of leaking classified documents in his memoir The Room Where It Happened.
The investigation marks the second time the Department of Justice has acted against Bolton over his memoir. Earlier in the year, the Department sued to stop the release of the memoir, claiming the book contained classified information that could threaten national security, as well as hurting the integrity of the presidency.
The lawsuit, however, was filed after the memoir was already published and distributed, soon to be released to the public. “With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done,” wrote Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., the judge presiding over the first case against Bolton. As such, the request to cease distribution was denied.
Just when Bolton thought he was in the clear, a grand jury subpoenaed the records for the book, including notes form the publisher, indicating that Bolton has ill-intentions in releasing his book.
With a grand jury officially sending out subpoenas for this probe, it makes the whole case a criminal investigation, making this hurt Bolton’s reputation and sales for his new book.
Bolton and his lawyer have agreed to cooperate with any all investigations. This could help with the investigation to go by quicker and smoother. Leak investigations are one of the longest processes to go through court because most of the testimony is ‘hear-say’, which is not clear evidence to indict and convict a former security advisor.
The book is said, to focus about the 17-month tenure of John Bolton’s position of national security advisor to the now President Trump, in which it said that trump was a “uninformed leader,” and “erratic” at times.
If found guilty of illegally disclosing classified information in this case, Bolton could lose all profits from his book sales, with that money being redirected to the Federal government.
Bolton was a Washington insider with years of experience in politics. He filled various roles in Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush’s administrations, as well as an official United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.
Bolton has been critiqued with his bold strategies with the focus of Western intervention into countries of Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, and many other middle eastern countries, in which all governments have resulted in destabilization.