Trump threatens former aide John Bolton with ‘criminal problems’ over his tell-all book

Indicating he may sue Mr Bolton over book’s contents, Mr Trump says he considers all conversations involving himself as ‘highly classified’

As former national security adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book on the Trump administration nears publication, the president is seeking to block it by legal means — and has said the author should anticipate ‘criminal problems’.

Mr Bolton’s highly anticipated book, The Room Where it Happened, has been held up for months by an extensive process of vetting. Its release date was pushed back first from March to May, then to 23 June.

The White House and attorney general continue to claim that the book’s publication would reveal classified information, but it has already been shipped to distributors’ warehouses.

Among other potentially explosive details, the book is expected to say that the investigation that saw Mr Trump impeached did not touch on the full scale of the administration’s misconduct.

According to a promotional blurb from publisher Simon & Schuster, “the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy.”

Asked at a Monday press conference why he is trying to prevent the book’s publication, Mr Trump said he “wasn’t impressed” with Mr Bolton while he worked for the administration and that the book was “inappropriate”.

“Somebody said he went out and wrote a book. If he wrote a book, I can’t imagine that he can because that’s highly classified information. Even conversations with me, they’re highly classified, I told that to the attorney general before, I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified,” Mr Trump said.

“So that would mean that if he wrote a book and the book gets out that he’s broken the law. And I would think that he’d have criminal problems. I hope so, otherwise — I mean they put a sailor in jail because he put a photograph of his bed and an engine of an old submarine.

“And this guy’s writing things about conversations, or about anything, and maybe he’s not telling the truth, he’s been known not to tell the truth, a lot ... But it’s up to the attorney general.”

The “sailor” to whom Mr Trump referred in his answer is Kristian Saucier, who in 2016 was sentenced to a year in prison for taking photographs of classified areas of a nuclear-powered attack submarine. Mr Trump pardoned him in 2018, saying “go out and have the life you deserve!”

The attorney general himself, Bill Barr, backed Mr Trump up, claiming Mr Bolton’s book had not been fully cleared and that he was violating the clearance agreements signed by departing administration officials.

“We don’t believe that Bolton went through that process,” said Mr Barr, Adding the book “hasn’t completed the process, and, therefore, is in violation of that agreement”.

Earlier this year, during Mr Trump’s impeachment, it emerged that Mr Bolton’s manuscript specifically asserted that the administration’s freeze on aid to Ukraine was tied to demands the government there investigate Joe Biden’s son — exactly the claim that lay at the heart of the impeachment charges.

Hearing these reports, Mr Trump tweeted his indignation: “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens. In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”

Ultimately, Mr Bolton did not testify to the House impeachment inquiry, and no witnesses were called by the Senate.

ABC News is set to air a pre-publication interview with Mr Bolton on Sunday. The network has trailed the interview heavily, saying that among other things, Mr Bolton will share details of the July 2019 phone call between president Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that formed the core of the president’s impeachment.