Trump declares all conversations with him 'as president' are 'highly classified'

(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

published 16 June 2020

President Trump on Monday told reporters that if former National Security Adviser John Bolton's new memoir, The Room Where It Happened, is released on June 23 as scheduled, "he's broken the law" and "would have criminal problems. I hope so."

Publishing the book is "highly inappropriate," Trump continued, as he considers "every conversation with me as president to be highly classified." Bolton, he added, is "known not to tell the truth, a lot."

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Bolton was known to take copious notes during meetings, and he held onto all of those legal pads when he left the White House. Attorney General William Barr has accused him of not fully working with the Trump administration to make sure no classified information is revealed in the book, but Bolton's attorney pushed back, writing in The Wall Street Journal last week that he did spend four months reviewing the memoir with officials, and they are trying to block the release by claiming it contains confidential material.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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