Ex-Defense Secretary Mark Esper sues the Pentagon

Former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper filed a lawsuit Sunday against the Pentagon, as Defense Department officials asked for around 60 pages of redactions from his forthcoming memoir. 

Esper has said the cuts are "crucial to telling important stories" of his time in former President Donald Trump's cabinet, according to the suit.

The forthcoming memoir, "A Sacred Oath," is scheduled for publication by William Morrow in May 2022. In a statement, Esper said the Department of Defense had "arbitrarily" redacted the manuscript he submitted.

His lawyer Mark Zaid wrote on Twitter: "Esper is highest-ranking official to ever sue." 

What is in Esper's lawsuit against the Pentagon?

Esper's lawsuit alleges, "Significant text is being improperly withheld from publication," and Pentagon reviewers are doing so "under the guise of classification."

His book is billed in the lawsuit as an "unvarnished and candid memoir" of his time in the Trump administration.

The lawsuit bills his tenure as "an unprecedented time of civil unrest, public health crises, growing threats abroad, Pentagon transformation, and a White House seemingly bent on circumventing the Constitution."

In a statement, the Gulf War veteran said he waited six months for the review process to finish, but ultimately was dissatisfied to find "my unclassified manuscript arbitrarily redacted without clearly being told why."

He said he had revealed no classified information in the draft manuscript.

Esper added, "it is with regret that legal recourse is the only path now available for me to tell my full story to the American people."

The lawsuit notes Esper is restricted by government secrecy agreements from publication without prior Pentagon approval and that doing so would open him up to possible civil and criminal liability.

Who is Mark Esper?

Esper served as secretary of the army from 2017 until 2019 and as defense secretary in the Trump administration from June 2019 until November 2020.

He was fired by Trump in a tweet a few days after Trump lost his reelection bid, a previously unprecedented course of action for a sitting president. Trump seized on the opportunity to install loyalists at top jobs in the Pentagon as he sought to challenge his electoral defeat.

During his time in the Trump administration, Esper publicly diverged from his boss over such things as deploying the military domestically to quell civil unrest stemming from the death of George Floyd in May 2020 in Minneapolis.

Esper believed he was keeping the Department of Defense apolitical, whereas Trump saw disloyalty in their public clash.

A graduate of West Point, Esper is part of a group of former Trump officials known as the "West Point mafia" that includes former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and two of his deputies as they all graduated from the prestigious defense academy in 1986.

ar/wmr (AP, Reuters)