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 was seeking should also bind the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and stores from disseminating the book once they received 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.

Source: New York Times June 18, 2020 00:55 UTC