The former Pentagon chief has sued to publish material in the memoir

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WASHINGTON Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has claimed in a lawsuit against the Department of Defense that the material was improperly prevented from his use as he sought to publish an unvarnished and honest memoir ” of his time in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

The lawsuit, filed Sunday in U.S. District Court in Washington, describes the memoir, A Sacred Oath, as an account of Espers ’tenure as Army secretary from 2017 to 2019 and his 18 months as defense secretary, which ended in a breakup he and Trump in a tweet just days after the president defeated his re-election bid.

The era in which Esper was head of the Pentagon was an unprecedented period of civil unrest, public health crises, growing threats abroad, Pentagon reform, and a White House that seemed leaning towards avoidance. to the Constitution, ”the lawsuit said.

Esper and Trump were severely split on military use during the June 2020 civil unrest following the assassination of George Floyd. Other issues led the president to believe that Esper was not honest enough while Esper believed he was trying to keep the department apolitical. The dismissal of a defense secretary after an election defeat has not yet taken place, but the opening has allowed Trump to install loyalists in top positions at the Pentagon as he continues to dispute his election defeat.

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The lawsuit asserted that the significant text in the memoir, scheduled for publication by William Morrow in May, was not properly handled under the guise of classification and Esper maintained that it had no classified information. The suit states that Esper was restricted by his confidentiality agreements from authorizing publication without Pentagon approval, or faced possible civil and criminal liability.

The lawsuit cited a letter Esper sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin criticizing the review process. He wrote that he was asked not to mention Trump and others at meetings, not to describe the conversations he had with Trump, and not to use certain verbs or nouns when describing historical events.

The letter describes other problematic topics and says about 60 pages of the manuscript contain redactions at one point. Agreeing with all of those redactions would result in a serious injustice to important moments in history that Americans need to know and understand, Esper wrote.

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The suit itself states that some of the stories Esper narrated in the manuscript under consideration appear to have been leaked to some mainstream media possibly undermining its impact on his book.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the department was aware of Esper’s concerns. As with all such reviews, the Department takes seriously its obligation to balance national security with the authors ’desired narrative. As this matter is now under trial, we will not comment further, “he said in a statement.

Esper, 57, a West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran, said in a statement that he waited six months for the review process to work but found my unidentified manuscript arbitrarily redacted vaguely. saying why.

I am more than disappointed that the current Administration is violating my First Amendment constitutional rights. And there is regret that the legal way is the only way I can use today to tell my whole story to Americans, he said.

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