US President Donald Trump on Monday said that former US national security adviser John Bolton would have broken the law and face criminal liability if a book he has written about his time in the White House is published.
Trump told reporters that Bolton knows he has classified information in his book, and that he had not completed a clearing process required for any book written by former government officials who had access to sensitive information.
“I will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law,” Trump said.
“That’s called criminal liability. That’s a big thing,” Trump added.
US Attorney General William Barr, speaking at the same event, said that theUS Department of Justice was trying to get Bolton to complete the clearance process and “make the necessary deletions of classified information.”
Trump fired Bolton in September last year after 519 days on the job amid simmering differences on a wide array of foreign policy issues.
Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is set to be published on June 23.
The publisher, Simon and Schuster, said in a news release on Friday that the book provides an insider account of Trump’s “inconsistent, scattershot decisionmaking process.”
The book details Trump’s dealings with China, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, Britain, France and Germany, the publisher said.
“This is the book Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read,” Simon and Schuster said.
Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said that the effort to block the book’s publication was doomed to fail.
“As usual, the government’s threats have nothing to do with safeguarding national security, and everything to do with avoiding scandal and embarrassment,” Wizner said.
Trump said the problem of publishing classified information including conversations with the president “becomes even worse if he lies about the conversation, which I understand he might have in some cases.”
He added that he had not read the book.
“So we’ll see what happens. They’re in court, or they’ll soon be in court,” Trump said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese