President Donald Trump may be headed for another foolish lawsuit that embarrasses him. According to the Justice Department, John Bolton is being sued for moving forward with his book when the administration says it hasn't been cleared by the classification review staff.
According to the lawsuit, however, it says “on or around April 27,” Ellen Knight, the official tasked with reviewing Bolton’s book, finished her review process. According to her, the book draft "did not contain classified information."
Trump claimed Monday, "any conversation with me is classified," which is not factually accurate, but may have tipped the president's hat that he has overclassified information in an effort to hide it.
The lawsuit does not include Bolton's publisher, it only includes Bolton, because Bolton is the one who signed the non-disclosure agreement about classified information. Republican lawyer and Trump foe George Conway explained "the First Amendment rule against no prior restraint applies with full force to the publisher."
Trump was recently outed after threatening a lawsuit against CNN about a poll showing him 14 points down from former Vice President Joe Biden. While the poll likely would have garnered the typical amount of attention that polls do, Trump's threat of the lawsuit raised the profile of his bad poll numbers even more and continued the story for more than the typical 24-hour news cycle.
Drawing more attention to Bolton's book will likely only hurt Trump as the DOJ suit scores the former national security adviser free media before publication on June 23.
It was a point that Twitter couldn't help but mock the president for. See the tweets below:
