Jim Comey. Leticia James. Is John Bolton Next?

There’s something you need to know about John Bolton. Specifically, the prepublication review of his book.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that sources familiar with the matter have indicated that John Bolton is days away from being indicted by Trump’s Justice Department for the mishandling of classified documents.

According to Politico, two search warrants were executed at the home and the office of the Trump former National Security advisor. According to reports, the warrants indicated FBI agents were seeking evidence related to three felony offenses, including gathering, transmitting or losing national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, and retaining classified information without permission.

I can’t speak to why Bolton (or anyone for that matter) wouldn’t have gone through his papers and returned anything marked classified after the Trump, Biden, and Pence investigations. Unless the DOJ decided to declare documents classified after the fact. But news reports indicated that the FBI found documents with classified markings in his office. They found nothing at his home, but confiscated electronic devices at both locations.

But you can’t talk about the kerfuffle between Bolton and Trump without mentioning the prepublication review of Bolton’s book in 2020.

In June of 2020, the Trump administration sued to block the publication of Bolton’s book stating that Bolton had breached non-disclosure agreements and risked national security by exposing classified information.

“(Bolton) struck a bargain with the United States as a condition of his employment in one of the most sensitive and important national security positions in the United States Government and now wants to renege on that bargain by unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public,” the lawsuit said.

But that’s not what happened. According to a letter written by lawyers on behalf of Ellen Knight - the woman that conducted the prepublication review of Bolton’s book for the NSC - not only had the book been cleared for publication, but the Trump administration acted in bad faith to try and suppress its release.

The letter describes the review process like this:

This review process involved a very significant investment of time and effort, with Ms. Knight and her colleague, the First Reviewer (a classified information expert with four years of experience as a reviewer for the NSC), spending hundreds of hours over the course of four months reviewing and researching information found in the over 500-page manuscript. They each spent weeks reading the first iteration of the manuscript, meticulously identifying information they deemed to be classified, meeting to consolidate their findings, and then conducting countless hours of research to determine what information was already publicly available.

Besides re-reading every chapter numerous times with each round of edits, Ms. Knight and her colleague each read through the entirety of the manuscript a total of four times. As a last step in the process, Ms. Knight gave the manuscript to the Acting Director for Access Management, a 20+year classified information expert with Original Classification Authority who to that point had not been involved in the Bolton review. He carefully read the manuscript to confirm – and he did confirm – that it no longer contained any sensitive or classified information.

Ms. Knight provided Ambassador Bolton with extensive guidance and best practices for writing around classified information, held four in-person meetings with Ambassador Bolton lasting a total of 14 hours, and spoke with him in ten telephone conversations, two of which were hours-long conversations to discuss edits and changes.

Ms. Knight and the First Reviewer came to the end of their review process on April 27 when they received Ambassador Bolton’s response to their last set of necessary changes, most of which at this point in the revision simply entailed providing citations. At that point, Ms. Knight determined that all classification concerns had been addressed and that publication of the manuscript, as heavily revised, would disclose no information that would cause harm to our national security – which conclusion was confirmed by the final read-through of the manuscript by the Acting Director for Access Management. Ms. Knight then informed Ambassador Bolton that she had no more proposed changes, but that the process was still ongoing and that she would reach out to him as soon as she had more information about the issuance of a clearance letter.

At that point, it should have been as simple as reaching out to the NSC to get a clearance letter. But that was easier said than done. According to Ms. Knight, she reached out to request the letter, the Deputy Legal Advisor Sue Bai instructed her to stand by and to take no further action.

Ms. Knight informed the court that unlike any other prepublication review process she’d participated in, she had to be in constant contact with the NSC about Bolton’s book in particular. In fact, it was Michael Ellis - the guy who hid the transcript of the perfect phone call with Zelensky in the code word classified system to keep eyes off it - that first told Ms. Knight about Bolton’s book. And at one point, Ellis and Sue Bai instructed Ms. Knight to communicate about Bolton’s book over the phone with them instead of in emails (probably to keep them out of the reach of FOIA requests.)

Soon after Ms. Knight notified NSC Legal that the review was complete, Ms. Bai called to request a copy of the reviewed manuscript, which Ms. Knight furnished to her. Over the following nine days, Ms. Knight received numerous requests from Ambassador Bolton for the clearance letter. Each time, Ms. Knight passed the request along to the NSC Legal staff, reminding them that the publication date for Ambassador Bolton’s book was June 23 and warning them that Ambassador Bolton and Mr. Cooper may be planning toward that publication date. When Ms. Knight asked why there was a delay in NSC Legal issuing a clearance letter, Ms. Bai attributed the delay to their focus on the COVID pandemic crisis.

But that COVID excuse turned out to be a lie.

On June 9, Deputy NSC Legal Advisor Bai called Ms. Knight with an unexpected request — to arrange for Michael Ellis (by this point serving as NSC Senior Director for Intelligence Programs and no longer NSC Deputy Legal Advisor) to receive Original Classifying Authority (OCA) training, which is required for those serving in a position that is authorized to originally classify information. Ms. Bai gave no explanation for the training request. The Acting Director for Access Management provided that training to Mr. Ellis on June 10.

By this time, Bolton had sent a letter saying he was moving forward with publication because Ms. Knight had said that everything was fine with the edited manuscript - though Ms. Knight never gave the official go-ahead. But here’s where it gets really weird. Michael Ellis wanted the prepublication training because he had conducted a review of his own!

Ms. Knight later learned how that second review came about. In reviewing the government’s filings in this litigation, she learned that National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien had reviewed the manuscript that Ms. Knight and her team determined was publishable on April 28 and concluded that that determination was wrong. He then instructed Michael Ellis, an NSC political appointee with no previous classification authority experience, to conduct another review. Between May 2 and June 9, Mr. Ellis reviewed the manuscript and flagged hundreds of passages that, in his opinion, were still classified.

At a subsequent meeting, the DOJ attorneys showed Ms. Knight the manuscript with Mr. Ellis’s hundreds of marked passages and asked her whether it was possible that she and her team had simply “missed this much classified information.” She firmly responded that that was not possible, and she proceeded to explain how Mr. Ellis’s re-review of the manuscript was fundamentally flawed. The fundamental flaw was that Mr. Ellis had done a “classification review” rather than a “prepublication review.” Based on her review of the markings, she could tell that Mr. Ellis had simply looked for passages that may have been classifiable under the broad categories laid out in the relevant Executive Order and deemed those passages classified and unpublishable, as though he were doing a classification review of a government record. However, this manuscript was not a government record; it was the First-Amendment protected writings of a private citizen.

On Saturday, June 13, Ms. Knight was called into work for a meeting in the West Wing. When she arrived at the NSC Legal office, she was greeted by Mr. Eisenberg, Ms. Bai and Patrick Philbin, the Deputy Counsel to the President from the White House Counsel’s Office. Over the following four hours, Mr. Philbin questioned Ms. Knight about a series of issues. For the first hour or so, he walked her through the many passages that were marked during Ellis’s re-review and asked her to explain how she and her team could have cleared each passage.

It was clear to Ms. Knight that they were trying to get her to admit that she and her team had missed something or made a mistake, which mistake could then be used to support their argument to block publication. To their consternation, Ms. Knight was able to explain the clear and objective reasoning behind her team’s decision-making as to each of the challenged passages. Having failed to find fault in her team’s specific determinations, they pivoted to an attempt to have her concede that the whole prepublication process is simply a matter of opinion – i.e. that prepublication determinations are unmoored from objective criteria and that the classified nature of information is simply in the eye of the beholder.

With that theory, they suggested that the differences between her team’s determination that the manuscript was publishable and Mr. Ellis’s determination that it was still full of classified information could be chalked up to a simple difference of opinion. Ms. Knight responded that this was not a difference of opinion, but was rather a difference between a prepublication review process conducted with the goal of producing a publishable manuscript and a classification review process conducted with the goal of blocking publication. Effort to Force Ms. Knight to Sign a Declaration: Having failed to secure Ms. Knight’s concession that this could all be chalked up to a difference between opinions, they changed tack and tried to persuade her to sign a declaration that purported to explain her role in the process.

After five days of meetings, in which the attorneys remained unwilling to address her concerns about the draft declaration and the process, Ms. Knight informed the NSC Legal Advisor that she would not sign the declaration. He and his Justice Department colleagues then proceeded with the litigation without any declaration from her. That was the last time Ms. Knight ever spoke with any member of the NSC Legal staff about the Bolton manuscript or litigation.

This is just something to keep in mind when and if Trump’s Justice Department is able to secure an indictment of John Bolton. Of course, if Bolton had classified in his house, and was asked to return it but didn’t, and knew it was there and willfully retained it, and ignored a subpoena to return it, then plotted to move the documents with his valet, then drained his pool to flood the server room where those videos were kept - Bolton could be in big trouble.

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~AG

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster File