In an Op-Ed published yesterday in The Hill, noted whistleblower attorney Stephen M. Kohn called the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia’s decision to allow the release of a book by former national security adviser John Bolton, “flawed.”
On Saturday, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia issued an order denying the government’s motion for a temporary restraining order to stop the book’s release. The decision allowed the book’s release because “the horse is already out of the barn,” referring to the 200,000 copies of the book ready for worldwide distribution.
However, the Judge agreed with the Trump administration that Bolton violated prepublication review requirements. The ruling “could be used to silence future whistleblowers and embolden government censors,” Kohn reasoned. Kohn explains how this “part of the court’s decision will have a chilling effect on whistleblowers who try to use the prepublication process to inform the American people about misconduct.”
Read Kohn’s analysis of Judge Lamberth’s decision in The Hill – Bolton book decision: Right answer, wrong reasoning.