A new lawsuit is seeking to lay bare how the White House censored former national security adviser John Bolton’s book and whether the passages officials wanted deleted were true national security secrets or just embarrassing to President Donald Trump.
The Freedom of Information act lawsuit filed early Thursday in Washington demands details on the prepublication review process for Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” which was formally released for sale Tuesday.
Officials, including a federal judge, have accused Bolton of putting national security at risk by bailing out of the review process. He contends he thought the process was done in April and that an additional round of checks senior officials initiated was a transparent effort to cater to Trump’s desire to suppress the tell-all book, which paints a deeply unflattering portrait of Trump.
Former government officials and transparency advocates have long complained that the process of clearing books for release is often protracted and maddeningly opaque.
A lawyer behind the new suit, Kel McClanahan, said the National Security Council’s arrangements for handling manuscripts are even more murky than those at places like the CIA.
“The NSC by its own admission doesn't follow any established rules when it does prepublication review,” McClanahan said.
“The Bolton case describes a prepublication review process driven by the whims of the political appointees in the White House, shrouded in the deference courts traditionally give the Intelligence Community on questions of national security,” he said. “The public deserves to know if the claims made behind closed doors about Bolton's book hold up to the scrutiny of a skeptical judge in a more demanding FOIA context.”
The suit follows up on FOIA requests submitted earlier this year by a prominent legal blogger and attorney, Devin Stone. Stone says he’s suspicious that politics infected the review of Bolton’s manuscript.
“Were there any political considerations in terms of preventing John Bolton from saying certain things?” Stone asked in a video posted on his YouTube channel, Legal Eagle. “Did the government prevent him from saying unclassified information that he had a right to say because it was politically damaging? Not surprisingly, the government has stonewalled our FOIA requests….We’re committed to taking this to the mat.”
The suit names half a dozen government agencies who appear to have had a hand in the review process, including the CIA, the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Justice Department filed suit against Bolton last week, accusing him of defying the review process and moving forward with publication of a book containing highly classified information. A judge turned down the government's request for an injunction, saying it was futile because advance copies of the book were already circulating.
The new FOIA suit represents another potential window on that review, but faces one major hurdle: The entity that oversaw the process—an office in the National Security Council—considers itself beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
In the decades after the modern FOIA law was put on the books in 1974, the NSC and some other parts of the White House complied with FOIA requests. But, over the years, the law’s reach in the White House has been pared back by the courts.
In 1996, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit ruled that the NSC was off-limits under FOIA, because it lacked independent authority. In 2016, the New York-based 2nd Circuit affirmed that conclusion.
Public access to records about the mechanics of White House operations was also set back in 2009 when the D.C. Circuit ruled that the White House’s Office of Administration was beyond the reach of FOIA.
Those limits have long bedeviled transparency advocates on the left and the right. McClanahan said he hopes the suit will roll back those limits--at least in part.
The suit argues that the NSC “directorate” that handles information security and reviews like the one of the Bolton book should be treated like other parts of the White House that are required to respond to FOIA requests, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
McClanahan, who runs the pro-transparency organization National Security Counselors, said he hopes the suit will contribute to efforts to reform the publication review apparatus.
“The entire prepublication review system is built on the idea that the executive branch must be trusted not to abuse it,” he said. “If this case shows that that trust is being betrayed, it is time to fix the system.”
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New lawsuit demands details on Bolton book review - POLITICO
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