Federal Judge Embarrasses Trump With Fiery Explanation About Ruling

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The Trump administration’s legal losses keep piling up. This Saturday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton can proceed with the publication of his memoir covering his time in the White House. The Trump administration had brought a court case in an attempt to stop the publication of the book, but as Lamberth noted, the effort is pointless, because the official release date of the book is this coming Tuesday, and the book has already been distributed around the country. In other words, the Trump administration seems so incompetent that they’re not even effective in their attempts at bringing self-serving court cases.

As the judge summarized:

‘For reasons that hardly need to be stated, the Court will not order a nationwide seizure and destruction of a political memoir.’

Lamberth elaborated:

‘A single dedicated individual with a book in hand could publish its contents far and wide from his local coffee shop. With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo.’

The judge did have criticism for Bolton, claiming that the former Trump administration official decided “to publish his book without securing final approval from national intelligence authorities,” although Bolton’s legal team has disputed the Trump administration’s claim that there’s something classified in the book. Bolton did submit his manuscript for a pre-publication review by national security authorities, and he adjusted his manuscript in line with their findings.

The Associated Press notes that Lamberth’s ruling allows “for a broader election-year readership and distribution of a memoir… that paints an unflattering portrait of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy decision-making during the turbulent year-and-a-half that Bolton spent in the White House.” Unflattering is definitely somewhat of an understatement — Bolton explains that from his perspective, Trump’s singularly guiding aim was to protect his re-election chances. Allegedly, Trump even asked Chinese President Xi Jinping for help with his re-election campaign and tried to get China to buy more agricultural products specifically to improve Trump’s standing among U.S. farmers. According to Bolton, Trump also privately supported the construction of concentration camps for Chinese Muslims.