Esper Memoir of Trump Tenure to Move Ahead After Legal Battle Ends

In 2020, a career official who oversaw the prepublication review of a book by John R. Bolton, a national security adviser in the Trump administration, accused White House aides of improperly politicizing the manuscript review.

Mr. Zaid said that review process was broken because of the time and money required to challenge the decisions in court and because ultimately the department reversed its position “on an overwhelming majority of classification decisions it earlier asserted were so vital to the national security interests of the United States, when the fact is they never were.”

Mr. Esper submitted a draft of the manuscript for the review process in late May, and came to believe the process was taking an unusually long time, according to the lawsuit. The Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review returned the manuscript in October without a written explanation for the deletions, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Esper said that some of the redactions “asked me to not quote former President Trump and others in meetings, to not describe conversations between the former president and me, and to not use certain verbs or nouns when describing historical events.”

“I was also asked to delete my views on the actions of other countries, on conversations I held with foreign officials, and regarding international events that have been widely reported,” Mr. Esper continued. “Many items were already in the public domain; some were even published by D.O.D.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/us/mark-esper-pentagon-memoir.html