According to a report in Capitol Hill on November 28, local time, Mark Esper, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense on the same day for illegally preventing himself from publishing non-confidential information in books.
This book, A Sacred Oath, is Esper’s personal memoir. Due to the mandatory pre-publishing review procedure that employees of the U.S. administration must follow, Esper submitted the original manuscript of the book to the U.S. Department of Defense on May 24, 2021. On October 7, Esper received a notice from the U.S. Department of Defense that some contents of the book needed to be modified because they were confidential. After receiving the notice, Esper contacted the Pentagon on many occasions to determine the reason why the content of the book needed to be modified, but no reply was received.
Esper said in the lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Defense delayed, obstructed and violated its constitutional right to publish books. Esper believes that some of the content of the book that has been required to be modified has been published by the Ministry of Defense, so the information it contains is not confidential, but public.
Esper also added in the lawsuit that although his book is under review, the “some content” described in his book has appeared in mainstream media articles. Esper suspected that the content of the book might have been leaked by censors.
