The White House has informed former national security adviser John Bolton that he can’t publish his book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," because it contains top secret material, CNN reported on Wednesday.
A top National Security Council official wrote a letter dated Jan. 23 to Bolton’s lawyer that the book’s manuscript "appears to contain significant amounts of classified information" and could not be published as written.
Some of the information was classified as "top secret," according to the letter, meaning that it "reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security."
The letter insisted that "The manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information."
Bolton has said that the book does not contain any such classified material, according to Business Insider.
The letter was dated three days before a New York Times article revealed that the upcoming memoir exposes a contradiction in Trump's defense against impeachment by alleging that the president directly tied Ukraine's military aid to demands for probes into his political rivals.
The threat to Bolton came a few hours after Trump slammed him in a series of tweets for what the president called a "nasty & untrue" book and as some Republicans senators contemplate forcing the GOP to call the former national security adviser to testify in the impeachment trial.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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