In a recent Washington Post op ed, the normally sage George Conway, a GOP apostate, tries to dignify John Bolton’s no-show stunt during the Senate impeachment hearings last winter.
With uncharacteristic insouciance he disputes the obvious – that Bolton was trying to avoid spilling his anti-Trump zingers to Congress so he could retain control of them and publish them for mega-bucks in his forthcoming memoir, to be released June 23.
And what a cash cow it is likely to be! Bolton, as Trump’s National Security Adviser, eyeballed many of the President’s most self-incriminating excesses.
Convoy argues, perversely, that Bolton was all for transparency – that he was counting on “honorable” GOP Senators subpoenaing his testimony and was yearning to provide it.
Why so? Because, says Conway, Bolton may have imagined “he’d be less open to being caricatured as a disgruntled, discharged adviser and his credibility would have been enhanced.”
If this sounds a little too twisty to be true, it is.
Bolton knew as well as the rest of us that Mitch McConnell would never allow any witnesses to be called by GOP Senators and that even the moderates among them were too craven to push back. He knew that the chances of his being subpoenaed were nil to zero and that a witness-free hearing and Trump’s peremptory acquittal were all but inevitable.
If his No-No-Nanette act had any purpose it was simply to hasten the inevitable along and to steal yet another march for his gold-plated memoir.
Conspicuously missing from Conway’s piece is any examination of how Bolton backhanded House investigators prior to the Senate showdown. First, he refused to testify without a subpoena; then he warned that if one were issued, he would go to court to test its validity. That of course would have triggered endless litigation, stalled the House inquiry, and removed it as potential competition for Bolton’s book.
Ka-ching!
The House of course refused to take the bait, shrugged Bolton off and sought information from other witnesses.
Conway dismisses the possibility that Bolton stiff-armed Congress for fear of a legal backlash from the administration.
Even now, he reminds us, Bolton is forging ahead with publication of his memoir despite White House refusal to grant official clearance, because “he doesn’t think he has anything to say that is classified or subject to executive privilege,” as if that will spare him a reckoning in court.
But clearly Conway doesn’t know anything about the Supreme Court ruling, U.S. v Snepp.
In that decision the Court found that the mere unapproved, censor-defying publication of my CIA memoir, Decent Interval, violated my obligations as a government fiduciary to seek official pre-publication review for any job-related writings, classified or not. Indeed, the government stipulated there were no secrets in my book. All the same, the Brethren gagged me for life for sidestepping clearance and relieved me of all the “ill-gotten gains” from my book – read: all royalties from its sale, ad infinitum, in perpetuity. I even had to fork over the equivalent in state taxes I had already paid on the royalties.
Talk about double jeopardy.
Under this precedent Bolton faces impoverishment if he publishes his memoir without official clearance, period. Moreover, Barr’s Justice Department may well seek damages against his publisher, Simon & Schuster, for its role in abetting Bolton’s breach of official pre-publication review rules.
Just such a specter haunted my own case but never materialized. If it is resurrected now, Bolton and his prosecutors will have opened the door to official censorship extending well beyond the ranks of government employees to the very doorstep of the free press and publishing.
The White House has already acted abominably in its handling of the Bolton manuscript, delaying approval for six months while raising all sorts of objections piecemeal, without any consistency, rhyme or reason, Effectively it has vest-pocket-vetoed publication.
Despite efforts by my own lawyers, the courts have never sanctified a precise deadline for completion of government pre-publication review procedures. Bolton might well seek to change that if he is dragged into court, by portraying the administration’s dilatory approach to clearance as de facto “prior restraint” of free speech in blatant violation of the First Amendment.
If he succeeds in getting some sort of clearance deadline enshrined by the courts, he will have slightly redeemed his own otherwise sordid performance.