WASHINGTON — The Justice Department asked a judge on Wednesday to order President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton to halt publication of his memoir, which has already been printed and distributed to booksellers, saying that it contained classified information even as details emerged from it.
In a court filing, the Trump administration also urged the judge overseeing the lawsuit, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, to declare that the potential restraining order it is seeking should also bind the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and bookstores from disseminating the book once they receive notice of it.
“Disclosure of the manuscript will damage the national security of the United States,” the government filing said. “The United States asks this court to hold defendant to the legal obligations he freely assumed as a condition of receiving access to classified information and prevent the harm to national security that will result if his manuscript is published to the world.”
The Justice Department’s filing amounted to a sharp escalation of a lawsuit it filed a day earlier accusing Mr. Bolton of failing to complete the prepublication review process he agreed to undergo as a condition of receiving his security clearance.
It initially asked the judge to seize his proceeds from the book, “The Room Where It Happened,” and to order him to try to get Simon & Schuster to halt publication, but did not request emergency action.
The new “emergency” filing, however, sought a temporary restraining order to freeze matters in place and then a preliminary injunction halting distribution of the book. It requested that Judge Lamberth hold a hearing on the matter on Friday.
Several legal specialists said the 11th-hour effort to block the book from reaching the public was unlikely to succeed for both practical and constitutional reasons.
“As is often the case with the Trump administration, this motion is all hat and no cattle,” said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The audience for this filing is not the court; it’s the president.”
Beyond the fact that the book was already widely distributed and its contents have appeared in news accounts, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment, which protects press freedoms, means that it is rarely constitutional for the government to try to stop a work from being published under the doctrine of so-called prior restraint.
In a statement, Simon & Schuster dismissed the threat.
“Tonight’s filing by the government is a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility,” the publisher said. “Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world. The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.”
However, the Supreme Court has upheld punishments imposed after publication, including seizing authors’ proceeds as a penalty for violating agreements to submit writings for prepublication review. That suggests that the $2 million Mr. Bolton reportedly received for writing his memoir may be in jeopardy.
The Justice Department’s claim that the book contains classified information also amounted to a veiled threat to prosecute Mr. Bolton. Mr. Trump this week said he considered “every conversation with me as president highly classified,” suggesting that Mr. Bolton was breaking the law.
Although a president has broad authority to deem information classified, it is not the case that every conversation with him counts as such. In any case, the Espionage Act instead makes it a felony to disclose information about the national defense that could harm the United States or help a foreign adversary to someone who is not authorized to receive it.
In a declaration attached to the lawsuit, Michael J. Ellis, the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, said he had reviewed the manuscript and determined that it contained classified information — including a particularly restricted form of top-secret data — related to a broad category that included military plans, foreign governments, intelligence activities or foreign relations.
He said he was offering the judge six specific examples of material in the book that was properly classified and whose disclosure could damage national security in a classified declaration accompanying his public filing.
Journalists and reviewers who have received copies of the book already have described other extensive passages recounting Mr. Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders and foreign affairs and national security issues that arose when Mr. Bolton was in office.
Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, has denied that the manuscript contains any legitimately classified information.
In a June 10 Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal vowing to go forward, he said Mr. Bolton worked closely with Ellen Knight, the National Security Council’s senior director for prepublication review of materials written by council personnel, in an “intensive four-month review.” After many changes, she told him in late April she had no more edits to ask of him, he said.
However, the White House never sent a letter saying the prepublication review process was complete, and then senior political appointees intervened in June to say they had new concerns. He called the complains “a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton, in violation of his constitutional right to speak on matters of the utmost public import.”
Mr. Bolton also wrote that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated not only Mr. Trump’s dealings with but also several instances where he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests, according to a copy of the book obtained by The New York Times.
Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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