President Trump’s campaign and family have both tried in recent weeks—and earlier in his presidency—to stop publication of books and other things that may be uncomfortable or embarrassing to him. And each time such efforts have failed, with the courts rejecting these attempts based on almost 90 years of legal precedent that allows such prior restraints only under the direst circumstances.
The most recent efforts sought to stop publication of niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough and of former national security adviser John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened. Previously, Trump sought to stop publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. And his campaign filed an arbitration claim alleging that Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book violated a non-disclosure agreement: a dubious legal claim. (Manigault Newman is also being prosecuted for allegedly failing to file federal financial disclosure forms.)
Courts roundly rejected the attempts to stop publication of the Mary Trump and John Bolton books, although claims against the authors themselves—that Mary Trump violated a non-disclosure agreement that was part of the settlement of her grandfather’s estate, and that John Bolton violated the agreement he signed to abide by government review of his book for classified information—continue. Read more