The week before John R. Bolton’s 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” was set to be released, President Trump’s first administration filed a federal lawsuit claiming the book was filled with classified information.
The suit by the Trump administration claimed that Mr. Bolton did not wait for the national security review of his manuscript, over which he worked closely with government officials, before allowing his book to be sent to printers. But the judge in the case sided with Mr. Bolton over the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the book’s publication.
The book went forward, and it was one of the most detailed and damaging accounts of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Bolton described what he labeled repeated instances of corruption and “obstruction as a way of life.”
Later, Ellen Knight, the career government official who led the review of the manuscript, described a process she called deeply politicized. She wrote in a letter to the court in connection with the administration’s lawsuit that she had cleared the book for publication at the end of April 2020 after working with Mr. Bolton, who had been Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, to remove classified material.
But she said White House political appointees overruled her, deciding that the book still contained classified information. The book, according to one former senior administration official familiar with what happened who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, ultimately contained no classified material, and the matter was settled.
In 2021, months after President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came into office, the government dropped the suit and the Justice Department closed a related criminal probe about possible mishandling of classified material.
The civil case was dropped “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be revived.
Still, Mr. Trump made his view of Mr. Bolton’s conduct plain long before any legal process played out.
In an interview with Fox News in June 2020, Mr. Trump declared that Mr. Bolton “released massive amounts of classified, and confidential, but classified information. That’s illegal and you go to jail for that.”
He added that it was “treasonous.”
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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