Fake news with fake timing...

White House has issued formal threat to Bolton to keep him from publishing book

This is the screaming headline from CNN. But they cannot even make it past paragraph two before it falls apart:

In a letter to Bolton's lawyer, a top official at the National Security Council wrote the unpublished manuscript of Bolton's book "appears to contain significant amounts of classified information" and couldn't be published as written.

So for starters, it's the National Security Council (not the White House) and this is a distinction with a difference. The NSC is made up of  people like the National Security Adviser, the Director of Homeland Security, Director of the CIA, Ambassador to the United Nations, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (armed forces), and Director of National Intelligence.

So the decision was not (as implied) made by the President or the White House, it was not made for political reasons, and it quite simply is not an accurate description. Nobody is telling John Bolton that he cannot publish the book. They are telling him that parts of the book need to be scrubbed for classified information before it is released.

Moreover, every book written by someone with former security clearance is required to submit their manuscript for to the NSC for review. To act as if this is something unusual, something nefarious, or something sinister is a flat out falsehood. All books are screened, they are all scrubbed, and I doubt any of them make it through unscathed.

Moreover, CNN (and others) are acting as if this was a knee jerk reaction to potential Bolton testimony. The truth is that the book was submitted quite some time ago, the review process has been on going, and the letter was sent to the Bolton attorneys "before" the Maggie Haberman "leak" story was even written.

So it makes the timing of both the original leak, and the story about the book scrubbing more than a little suspicious. Either someone in the NSC illegally leaked this information at the most "inopportune" time for the President, or the NYT sat on the story until they felt it created the maximum impact.

Either way, the leak didn't seem to change the dynamics and quite possibly had the opposite effect. GOP Senators can now largely argue that they already know what Bolton would have said (which is not substantially different from what a dozen other people have stated) and make their decision based on even the worst case assumptions.