“The Trump administration sued former national security adviser John Bolton on Tuesday to delay the publication of a book that the White House says contains classified information and that is expected to paint an unfavorable portrait of the president’s foreign policy decision-making. The civil lawsuit in Washington’s federal court follows warnings from President Donald Trump that Bolton could face a ‘criminal problem’ if he doesn’t halt plans to publish the book, which is scheduled for release next week.” AP News

Exclusive excerpts/early copies of the book have been obtained by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Both sides agree that the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice has little merit:

“The biggest problem is that the administration is seeking a prior restraint of speech before it occurs — not just damages for injuries allegedly caused by speech after the fact. The Supreme Court has never upheld a prior restraint on speech about matters of public concern, and in the Pentagon Papers case refused to enjoin publication of a trove of classified information concerning the Vietnam War…

“While the Justice Department’s complaint tries to evade the prior restraint label by asking the court to order Bolton to stop Simon & Schuster from publishing, this tortured approach cannot hide that a prior restraint is exactly what the administration is seeking: a court order stopping publication of a book. The chief government reviewer of the book concluded, after exhaustive analysis and editing, that the book contains no classified information. But even if it did, that would not be sufficient to justify a prior restraint. Ellis’s vague ‘concerns’ and Trump’s baseless assertion that every conversation with him is classified do not come close to justifying a prior restraint.”
Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., Washington Post

“[In the Pentagon Papers case] even though most of the justices agreed the information the newspaper wanted to publish was indeed classified, and that its publication likely would harm at least some U.S. interests, a 6-3 court majority still ruled that the First Amendment’s free-press guarantee forbade the government from banning its publication. Indeed, even centrists Byron White and Potter Stewart, the two justices in the majority who were the most respectful of the president’s desire to protect national security through control of information, wrote that it is especially important for press freedoms to be guaranteed in the same realm of national security…

“Specifically, because the courts and Congress have less constitutional power to restrain the executive in matters of defense and foreign affairs, they wrote, ‘In absence of governmental checks and balances, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in [these realms] may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government’… Unlike in the Pentagon Papers case, Bolton’s material isn’t obviously classified in the first place, and it is almost impossible to be of a nature anywhere near as damaging as the release of detailed military information at a time when the nation was embroiled in the hot Vietnam War.”
Quin Hillyer, Washington Examiner

Other opinions below.