Legal

The likely futility of the DOJ’s request for a temporary restraining order blocking publication of John Bolton’s THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED — which has effectively already been published and distributed around the world — was clear in a lengthy Friday afternoon hearing before Judge Royce Lamberth as soon as he deployed his Texas lexicon: “It seems to me…that the horse, as we used to say in Texas, seems to be out of the barn.” The government’s weak response was that “the onus is on Mr. Bolton to figure out how to” recall the hundreds of thousands of books in […]

Judge Royce C. Lamberth set a hearing for 1:00 PM on Friday, via videoconference, to hear arguments on the Department of Justice’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction blocking the release of John Bolton’s book. Meanwhile, papers filed by Bolton’s attorneys explain why — no matter how the judge rules — release of the book cannot be stopped. “There is nothing that Ambassador Bolton can do to stop the book from becoming public on June 23; indeed, it is already public.” As Simon & Schuster ceo Jonathan Karp attests, “More than 200,000 copies of the book have […]

Now that major media have published full coverage of John Bolton’s forthcoming book THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED, including reviews and an authorized excerpt, the government has filed an additional motion on top of their Tuesday breach of contract suit asking for a temporary injunction blocking release of the book. They ask for a hearing “at the Court’s earliest convenience on Friday, June 19, 2020.” The government insists that, “Disclosure of the manuscript will damage the national security of the United States.” They claim the book “contains instances of information that, if disclosed, reasonably could be expected to cause serious […]

Following the filing of a lawsuit by four major publishers at the beginning of June over the Internet Archive’s “willful mass copyright infringement,” the IA will at least “close” their self-proclaimed National Emergency Library two weeks earlier than originally announced, on June 16. “We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive,” which is widely considered to have no viable legal defense for the uncontrolled digital lending they initiated in late March. They will try to defend their self-invented practice of controlled digital lending — the core principles of which they violated at […]