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John Bolton and the Leaked Manuscript
Just when we could see the impeachment trial winding down as the President’s defense team squashed the House Managers, we learn that the John Bolton manuscript of his new book has been leaked. What a shock. The manuscript has not been quoted and the references to it have been vague. (The NY Times article is behind a paywall.)
The manuscript was sent to the National Security Council’s Records Management Division for a “standard prepublication security review” on December 30, in the belief that no classified information was included. Over the weekend, the information was conveniently leaked to the New York Times. Yet there was this report:
Sarah Tinsley, an adviser to Bolton, told Axios that the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations sent the draft manuscript only to the White House for a prepublication review by the National Security Council. ‘The ambassador has not passed the draft manuscript to anyone else. Period,’ she said.
Given her report, it’s difficult to pinpoint who might have leaked it. Here’s a report from the Conservative Treehouse:
Remember the issue a little more than a week ago when the National Security Council senior director for European and Russian affairs, Andrew Peek, was escorted from the White House grounds and is said to be under a security-related investigation?
On Friday January 17th, 2020, the National Security Council senior director for European and Russian affairs, Andrew Peek, was escorted from the White House grounds and is currently under a security investigation.
Is that evidence of anything? No.
Others have been suggested as suspects for leaking the manuscript, but no one has any evidence. So here’s what I want to point out, and get your input:
- I don’t think John Bolton was behind the leak, but he’s also not surprised. What do you think?
- I think Bolton should offer an interview to a news outlet where he can set the record straight. He doesn’t have to provide quotes from his book, but he can either validate or invalidate the implication that Trump told him that he wanted to hold funds from Ukraine unless they investigated as he’d supposedly requested. He should agree to an interview by midweek.
- I’m trying to figure out why Bolton has offered to testify if subpoenaed:
- He wants revenge against Trump for firing him and will tell everything that he thinks he can share.
- He wants publicity for his book.
- He wants to humiliate the Democrats by refusing to testify due to Executive Privilege. (I hope this is the reason.)
- Do you think they’ll agree to call witnesses to examine Bolton, or will the specter of a Biden debacle stop the Democrats?
I just want the Senate Impeachment trial to be over. What do you hope, or believe, John Bolton will do now?
Published in Politics
My wife’s theory: Bolton agreed to completely exonerate the president in his testimony if Trump iced Soleimani.
I’m guessing Bolton is a modern-day fanatic. He is singularly focused on ridding the world of the ‘enemy’ as he perceives them to be. So it doesn’t much matter who or what gets harmed by his actions or words.
Thank you Susan, for the links. There I learned G.W. Bush said outright that he didn’t find Bolton credible. This comes from a President for whom I’ve lost some respect, but I have never thought he spoke impulsively or injudiciously – certainly not about anyone in his administration.
Also, Max Boot has criticized Bolton for essentially being too hawkish ( yeah, pretty radical coming from him!).
I wondered why Trump took him on. Who advocated/pressured for Bolton? Was Bolton little more than a bad-cop Avatar Trump was using to negotiate?
Bolton seems to be ‘our’ version of the crazy Iranian mullahs. He’s essentially chanting, “Death to Iran!” at every opportunity.
The MSM is doing a fantastic job of discrediting themselves to both the mainstream right and a large part of the left. Bolton is the guy who insisted there were WMD’s and we had to act. If there was one person who the left has pilloried more as a war hawk and a liar it was Bolton. Now all these MSM hosts are breathlessly parroting speculation about what’s in his upcoming book as absolute fact.
I agree with you, @bryangstephens. His need to get it out quickly has its own demerits.
I don’t know a whole lot about Bolton’s background, except he’s a neocon, stubborn and outspoken, @franco. I don’t know about his lying. I’m glad he tried to shake up the UN while he was there, although I think Nikki Haley showed a whole lot more finesse in her work there. Everything about this book and the process for review smells.
If Bolton and his publisher really didn’t leak the information, than you’d think he’d be as mad at them as he is at the mullahs, because the leak has put him in the position of having to testify in the wake of Trump’s taking out Soleimani. But if this is simply payback for Trump not taking action beforehand, and seemingly going in the other direction towards not confronting Iran while Bolton was in the White House, he’s simply going to come off as petty (and I’m not sure where Bolton goes politically afterwards, since the progressive media will dump him, post-trial, if he maintains his hawkish positions).
If this whole mess of leaking the book was a surprise, and he has any honor, he should take the advice of his aide and withdraw the book’s publication. We’ll see . . .
The timing, and now this. When I first read Vindman’s brother was vetting the book, my jaw dropped. After several seconds of intense critical thought, it makes perfect sense. DC is known for its incestuous relationships (married couples in both politics and the MSM), so having one’s brother directly involved in the impeachment proceedings is cause enough to join in the fun . . .
At the very least, he needs to do what Byron York tweeted out Sunday night, and state his position in public, if nothing else about the timing of the leak to the Times. That he hasn’t blasted the unauthorized release makes it come across as though he’s not all that upset about the timing here (unless he plans to pull an Oliver North on Senate Democrats, and offers up testimony that’s nothing like what the Times said was in the book. But given the acrimony there was when he left the White House, I wouldn’t count on that).
I’d also like him to say at least that the NYT mischaracterized what he wrote. That he didn’t implicate Trump. But he might think that admitting that would hurt book sales.
True. The Times admitted it hadn’t read the book yet. Typical . . .
From the WSJ op-ed page this morning:
Of course, we should never discount the possibility that the New York Times is just making stuff up.
John Durham and even Robert Mueller came out with statements rebuffing media reports when the anti-Trump information was so egregiously wrong, they felt they had to respond. Bolton could do the same thing here if he wanted to, and if the Times’ information completely mischaracterized what Bolton put into the book. The fact he’s now gone almost 48 hours without a response tends to indicate he’s OK with how the Times represented his book, if not the timing of the release.
I wouldn’t want to get cross wise with the Attorney General.
Susan, thanks for the update. It appears that Bolton was acting properly. He wrote a book, then submitted the manuscript to the National Security Council for review. I’m not completely sure that this is the right agency, but I assume so, and it is certainly the right idea.
I noted yesterday, in the comments to one of Gary’s posts, that there is an important issue of executive privilege in this instance. I drew an analogy between executive privilege and the attorney-client privilege, which I believe is a valid analogy.
This means that it would be improper for Bolton to disclose any potentially privileged information, without the President’s approval. I assume that the NSC review was the process for obtaining such approval, or for the President to require that certain information be kept confidential.
I agree with your first point here. Though it would have been better if Bolton had waited before pressing forward with this book. There’s an article today at Fox (here) by Bolton’s friend and former chief of staff, explaining that Bolton should have waited.
On your second point, I completely disagree. The wrongful leak should be disregarded. When there has been a breach of a privilege or duty of confidentiality, it only compounds the problem to require further disclosure.
Is there information out there indicating that review procedures had been completed? I could easily have missed it but it would seem that the publisher could have done the release on an authorized basis if that were the case.
I would also be reluctant to conclude that a completed review, in and of itself, constitutes a de facto Executive Privilege waiver, but I have no particular basis for saying that. I do think a possible explanation for Bolton’s silence is that he may be aware that the leak–accurate or not–was done before the vetting process was complete and is opting for personal non-disclosure.
I like Jerry’s analogy to Attorney/Client Privilege. Past advisors commenting on delicate policy matters after they have left working for the President is more than a little unseemly, and almost never in the Nation’s interest. Many of us have been in meetings and have had different recollections of what was said or meant for one thing, and then there is the element of context that is very difficult to recreate after the fact in a book.
If Bolton is commenting negatively on what Trump did, Bolton has flushed his career down the toilet for he will never again have any credibility. Not only is such a comment unseemly, there is, as others have commented, nothing wrong with Trump trying to get to the bottom of the Ukraine/Biden scandal.
It is also possible that the NYTimes post has mischaracterized Bolton’s comments for the NYTimes there is no downside and little prospect of punishment to lying about such things in this fake news environment.
It’s my understanding Bolton’s manuscript was submitted for a classification review. As best I know, there is no law requiring an ex official to submit a manuscript for vetting of executive privilege material. That would amount to pre publication censorship. I presume it’s a matter of who is saying what in what venue. Making a statement in a book is different than testifying under oath to Congress or in a court.
I don’t know the law in this area either, but I would expect that there are prohibitions against revealing classified or otherwise protected information.
He’s a shoo-in for a gig at CNN, then.
Mark Levin has a great point:
“Bolton’s book was obviously timed for maximum impact & sales. Having written 8 books, I can tell you that it’s extraordinary that an author could complete a book in about 2 months and the published release it in 3-4 months. In approximately 6 months since departing the White House, Bolton’s book will be in bookstores.”
I thought it might be helpful to provide some quotes from the NYT story that directly relate to the leaked material. I should note that the story is far more extensive than this with a lot of talk about the implications of the material. So I’m very confident that the small portions below constitute “fair use.” Nowhere in the article is Bolton’s manuscript directly quoted (something that I assumed but was not sure of). It’s also very worth noting from the second excerpt that the manuscript apparently was circulated outside the White House–which may explain quite a bit. These excerpts are not consecutive in the article but do represent pretty much everything related to what the manuscript allegedly says. There’s little context and no way to really tell with specificity when the events occurred.
BTW, the revelation about the manuscript being circulated seemed to me to be a “bombshell,” but it doesn’t seem to have been treated as such by those who are busy considering the manuscript to be bomb-worthy.
Perhaps because Bolton, his lawyer and his publisher all claim it was not.
Maybe the author is channeling Bill Clinton. It depends on the meaning of circulated.
To call Bolton a neocon is to drain the word of all meaning.
Bolton is a hawk. He does not wish to rebuild the world in our democratic image. He wants to reduce threats to his country to rubble.
That he should never be given a position of trust in any future administration.
Only thing certain is some a Republicans want to drag this out until they screw it up.
I don’t quite agree. I think that, in the circumstances, Bolton should have delayed the release of his book until after the 2020 election. I think that this is how Robert Gates handled a similar situation. He retired in 2011, but did not publish his memoir until 2014, after President Obama’s 2012 reelection.
This is sort of the point. The GOP tends to like to take any victory or advantage and beat it into a losing point. I have never seen a party so bent on destroying itself. It is one of the reasons I can not be a Republican.
Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.