White House defends Bolton hiring as Trump administration tries to block book

As a federal judge considered the Trump administration’s attempt to block a book by John Bolton which has held the president up to global ridicule and scorn, the president’s press secretary defended the decision to hire the national security adviser in the first place.

Related: Bolton's book makes it clear: Trump is the amoral charlatan we knew he was

At a White House briefing, an NBC News reporter quoted Donald Trump’s own insults about Bolton and other former top aides when he asked: “Why does the president keep hiring people who are dumb as a rock, overrated, way over their heads, whacko and incompetent?”

Trump, Kayleigh McEnany said, “makes hiring decisions based on the fact that he likes to have countervailing viewpoints … he likes the model of having a ‘team of rivals’ like what we saw in President Lincoln’s administration”.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, famously filled his cabinet with men who coveted the top job – the secretary of state William Seward, treasury secretary and future supreme court justice Salmon P Chase and attorney general Edward Bates among them – before winning the civil war and abolishing slavery.

Trump, meanwhile, has abused his ex-hires including the secretary of state Rex Tillerson, defense secretary Jim Mattis and attorney general Jeff Sessions in similar terms to those quoted at Friday’s briefing. He currently presides over a catastrophic pandemic, a cratered economy and widespread civil unrest over racism and police brutality.

“Sometimes those rivals prove those labels to be true,” McEnany said of the insults, “and that’s particularly true in the case of John Bolton, who repeatedly praised the president then turned [on him].”

Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations and leading foreign policy hawk, was Trump’s third national security adviser. He worked at the White House from April 2018 to September 2019, when he resigned and Trump claimed to have fired him.

He did not comply with a House subpoena during impeachment proceedings and was not called as a witness by the Republican-held Senate, before it acquitted the president of abusing his power in attempts to have Ukraine produce dirt on his political rivals.

He has now written a tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, excerpts of which have been widely published this week, since the Department of Justice (DoJ) filed suit in federal court in Washington DC.

The excerpts have proved tremendously embarrassing to Trump, detailing what Bolton says is impeachable conduct, for example in asking China to help secure his re-election, and depicting a president ignorant of basic geopolitical realities, like not understanding Finland was an independent country.

Bolton told ABC News on Thursday Trump is not “fit for office” and does not have “the competence to carry out the job”. An extensive interview is due to run on Sunday night. The book is due in stores on 23 June.

In return, Trump has abused Bolton as a “whacko” who nobody liked, claiming his former aide’s allegations are untrue but also that his book should be suppressed as it contains classified information.

Publisher Simon & Schuster and lawyers for Bolton have countered that classified information was removed in coordination with the administration. Some such information has leaked.

In Washington on Friday, district court judge Royce Lamberth was hearing the DoJ’s case. Writers’ groups filed briefs in support of Bolton.

“Pen America supports the first amendment right of public employees to produce works that are critical of the government, and of readers to receive their unique perspective unfettered by government censorship,” one brief said.

The Pen brief also noted the vetting process and said: “It is not difficult to see what is going on. The president is employing the apparatus of the federal government to punish his political enemies, thwart freedom of speech, and pursue his political interests in an election year.”

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also filed a brief, with the Association of American Publishers, Dow Jones, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Most observers do not expect Bolton’s book to be blocked. The attorney Ted Boutros, who worked on the Pen brief, said: “The supreme court has never upheld a prior restraint on speech about matters of public concern, nor should the district court do so in this case.”

Cases cited included New York Times Co v United States, the landmark 1971 supreme court ruling which said the Nixon administration could not block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret report about the Vietnam war.

In a statement, Nora Benavidez, Pen America’s director of US free expression programmes, said: “We know the president has a penchant for lobbing attacks at those whose commentary he wants to suppress. It’s why we sued President Trump in 2018, as he has engaged in an unconstitutional pattern of targeting reporters whose coverage he dislikes.”

Bolton also details comments by Trump in which the president said some reporters should be imprisoned or executed.

Related: There are no heroes in the John Bolton v Donald Trump story | Andrew Gawthorpe

Trump books have become big business, ever since the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury in January 2018. Then, after the Guardian published excerpts, the president threatened to go to court. Publisher Henry Holt & Co responded by rushing the book to stores.

Simon & Schuster has also announced the July publication of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, a book by Trump’s niece.

The publisher says Mary L Trump will describe “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse” that explain the inner workings of “one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families”.

Trump has reportedly mused about suing to stop that book. According to the Daily Beast, nearly 20 years ago Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, signed a non-disclosure agreement regarding litigation over a family will and her relationship with Donald Trump and his siblings.

• This article was amended on 19 June 2020 to correct Mary Trump’s job title.