But — as predicted Friday by Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer with deep experience in national security and intelligence — the judge hearing the case declined to halt publication of Bolton’s memoir of his tenure in the Trump administration, “The Room Where It Happened,” paving the way for it to go on sale Tuesday.
Zaid told the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast that a Friday federal court hearing to determine whether to stop Bolton’s book from being published was “painful at times to listen to.” He predicted that Bolton will forfeit his profits to the U.S. government, making the Treasury the likely biggest financial beneficiary from Bolton’s book.
But Zaid doubted that the government would succeed in stopping publication of the book, which is scheduled to go on sale Tuesday and is already a prepublication bestseller on Amazon.
Leaks from the book appearing in newspapers this week have led to an uproar over Bolton’s scathing portrait of a corrupt and ignorant president who went against his own administration’s policies by, among other examples, telling Chinese President Xi Jinping he didn’t object to constructing concentration camps for China’s Uighur minority.
Trump didn’t know that Britain had nuclear weapons, or that Finland was an independent nation, according to Bolton, a longtime Republican national security operative who was reportedly paid $2 million for the book.
Zaid predicted legal consequences for Bolton after Friday’s pivotal hearing even while concluding the Justice Department would have no success in persuading Judge Royce Lamberth to order the former national security adviser to stop distribution of his book, hundreds of thousands of copies of which have already been shipped to bookstores around the world.
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Videography by Barbara Rosenfeld 
