Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper filed a lawsuit against the department he formerly oversaw on Sunday, accusing Pentagon officials of unfairly obstructing substantial sections of his planned biography about his turbulent experience under President Donald J. Trump.
Esper’s charges are put out in a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. by Trump, who dismissed him soon after losing his re-election effort in November.
“Significant text is being improperly withheld from publication in Secretary Esper’s manuscript under the guise of classification,” the suit said. “The withheld text is crucial to telling important stories discussed in the manuscript.”
Esper said in a statement that his purpose with the book, titled “A Sacred Oath,” which is due out in May, was to provide the public with “a full and unvarnished accounting of our nation’s history, especially the more difficult periods.”
He added: “I am more than disappointed the current administration is infringing on my First Amendment constitutional rights. And it is with regret that legal recourse is the only path now available for me to tell my full story to the American people.”
John F. Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said the agency was aware of Esper’s concerns. “As with all such reviews, the department takes seriously its obligation to balance national security with an author’s narrative desire,” Kirby said. “Given that this matter is now under litigation, we will refrain from commenting further.”
Esper is one of the most senior former government officials, if not the most senior, to file a lawsuit for prior restraint in connection with a book. The case was filed a year after President Biden vowed during his presidential campaign to restore the standards that his predecessor had thrown down.
Executive branch personnel must submit their manuscripts to the prepublication review process, which includes top officials such as the secretary of state and the national security advisor as well as lower-level staff such as federal prosecutors and agents. This procedure is designed to keep materials that might jeopardize national security from becoming public while still safeguarding the author’s First Amendment rights.
When an agency or department is concerned about information being disclosed, that portion of the book is meant to be deleted or modified to disguise the problematic material. The procedure is not meant to be used to prevent embarrassing or politically harmful material from becoming public.
During the Trump administration, officials were accused of using prepublication review to silence John R. Bolton, the former national security advisor who was attempting to publish a book about his time working for Trump, which included numerous tales that the president wished to keep secret.
A veteran administration official accused Trump’s closest advisors of unlawfully interfering in the process to muzzle Bolton. Despite the intervention, Bolton released “The Room Where It Happened,” prompting Trump’s Justice Department to sue him for the profits. It also initiated a criminal probe against him. Merrick B. Garland, the current Attorney General, abandoned the complaint and the inquiry in June.
Esper is represented by Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer specializing in protecting government whistleblowers.
Esper, according to the complaint, submitted a draft of the text to the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review in late May.
“As defense secretary for nearly 18 months, he led D.O.D. through an unprecedented time of civil unrest, public health crises, growing threats abroad, Pentagon transformation and a White House seemingly bent on circumventing the Constitution,” the lawsuit said. “‘A Sacred Oath’ is Secretary Esper’s unvarnished and candid memoir of those remarkable and dangerous times.”
According to the claim, Esper worked closely with the prepublication review office for six months, finally concluding that the process was taking an unreasonably lengthy period.
Esper expressed his worries in an email to his successor, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, on November 8. Esper said that when he submitted the document for evaluation in May, he was satisfied it included nothing secret or that would jeopardize national security, and that he still believes thus.
Esper stated that when the office returned the document to him last month, “multiple words, sentences and paragraphs from approximately 60 pages of the manuscript were redacted. No written explanation was offered to justify the deletions.”
Esper said that the office was unable to determine that “the redacted items contain classified information or compromise national security.” in subsequent talks.
He 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,” Esper continued. “Many items were already in the public domain; some were even published by D.O.D.”
He said that in another redaction, military officials requested a revision to material made public by the department in January 2020. Austin never responded to Esper. However, he requested the agency to defend its redactions and alterations for a week. Instead of a reason, he got notification a week later that his revised paper was ready.
Esper did not name the aides in the prepublication office with whom he spoke, but he portrayed them as professional in his conversations with them. Esper stated in his email to Austin that on Nov. 5, he reviewed the review process with the defense secretary’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, and the department’s director of administration and management, Michael B. Donley, in order to move the process forward. They recommended that he meet with the unit proposing the majority of the redactions “to try to find compromise language.”
“While I appreciate their efforts, I should not be required to change my views, opinions or descriptions of events simply because they may be too candid at times for normal diplomatic protocol,” Esper said in the email, adding that the review process was “about protecting classified information and not harming national security — two important standards to which I am fully committed” and that his “constitutional rights should not be abridged because my story or choice of words may prompt uncomfortable discussions in foreign policy circles.”
According to the claim, Esper was also bothered by the fact that some of the tales in the draft text suddenly started appearing in news pieces. “At least one narrative, which was more than a year old and known to just a small number of top D.O.D. personnel, had not before been publicly addressed,” the complaint stated.
According to the lawsuit, the department “has failed to demonstrate the existence of substantial government interests that would enable it to prohibit the publication of unclassified information within Secretary Esper’s manuscript.”
