Criminal Justice & the Rule of Law Intelligence

Court Declines to Block Release of Bolton's Book

Quinta Jurecic
Saturday, June 20, 2020, 11:53 AM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the government's motion for a temporary restraining order to block distribution of the new memoir by former national security advisor John Bolton. Though Judge Lamberth ruled that "Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns," he found that "the horse is out of the barn" regarding Bolton's memoir—which will be published on June 23—and wrote that, "For reasons that hardly need to be stated, the Court will not order a nationwide seizure and destruction of a political memoir."

The document is available here and below.


Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.

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