Government

Bolton's Bet Pays Off Bigly

Garland dumps DOJ suit over Bolton's book.

By  
on

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Somewhere John Bolton is twirling his mustache and laughing maniacally.

Yesterday the government quietly dropped its suit against the former National Security Advisor for revealing “classified information” in his bestseller (affiliate link) “The Room Where It Happened” dishing the dirt on his time in the Trump White House. Bolton gets to keep his $2 million advance — or whatever’s left of it after he finishes paying off Charles Cooper — and faces no further jeopardy for telling the world about Trump’s “drug deal” to extort the president of Ukraine into ginning up dirt on Joe Biden.

And the government doesn’t have to ‘splain exactly how Michael Ellis, Devin Nunes’s former assistant on the House Intelligence Committee, wound up finding a boatload of supposedly top secret stuff in Bolton’s manuscript after Ellen Knight, the career review officer assigned to the book, had cleared it for publication. Ellis had not completed the training on how to identify classified material at the time he marked up Bolton’s manuscript and appears to have retroactively classified some of the material in it, but once he finished his homework, Ellis agreed with himself that Bolton’s book was full of secrets.

And while US District Judge Royce Lamberth seemed to accept the government’s assertions that Bolton’s book contained classified information which might harm the national security by its disclosure, he had given the greenlight for Cooper to start deposing Ellis and Knight, subjecting internal NSC decisions to exactly the kind of scrutiny those NatSec guys hate the most.

The New York Times reports that the Garland DOJ has been negotiating for weeks to get out of this mess left by Bill Barr. The Department had already disposed of the even more ridiculous suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for writing a mean book about her best friend for never Melania. And with the one-sentence stipulation of dismissal filed yesterday in Bolton’s suit, it extricates itself from another public discussion of exactly how the previous occupant of the White House sicced the DOJ on Trump’s personal enemies.

“Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information,” Trump said in one of many abusive tweets about his former staffer.

Sponsored

“Bolton broke the law and has been called out and rebuked for so doing, with a really big price to pay. He likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them. Now he will have bombs dropped on him!” he fulminated in another.

So now the DOJ is spared the ignominy of arguing that the highly unusual classification process and subsequent claim against Bolton had nothing at all to do with very public pressure from the White House drop bombs on the former NSA.

Bolton bet that Biden would win, and this whole nasty business would go away, and he was right. The Mustache Man rides again!

Justice Dept. Ends Criminal Inquiry and Lawsuit on John Bolton’s Book [NYT]
US v. Bolton [Docket via Court Listener]

Sponsored

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

, ,