The passage in the book “Sacred Oath”, which comes out on Tuesday, was a “major” problem when Esper sent his manuscript to the agency for review, people told CNN on Friday.
Resistance on the issue is partly why Esper is suing the agency he once ran and accusing it of improper censorship, people said.
“They were especially worried about the potential to disrupt US-Mexico relations,” one man told CNN.
“They strongly opposed it,” the man added.
Defense Department spokesmen did not dispute CNN’s report when asked for comment on Friday.
Instead, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense said: “We have followed each of our long-established protocols and policies, as we do for any book that is submitted for review before publication. Besides, we have nothing to offer.
Members of the executive are required to submit manuscripts to the agency’s review books to ensure that they do not contain sensitive material, such as classified information. However, the process is not intended to be used to conceal information from the public simply because it may be inconvenient for the government or employees who serve or have served in it.
Esper claims that in his case the process went wrong.
In a lawsuit filed after he presented his manuscript, Esper argued that the Department of Defense, which has so far been part of the Biden administration, “wrongly detained” what he described as “significant text” under “the cover of classification ‘.
Esper eventually dismissed the case because the Pentagon reversed its course to the “vast majority” of the controversial material, his lawyer Mark Zayd said at the time.
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman first reported on Thursday that Esper’s claim in the book that Trump was proposing the idea of launching rockets in Mexico to “destroy drug labs” and “destroy cartels.”
In the passage, a copy of which was received by CNN, Esper described the conversations as “quite disturbing” and said that if he had “not seen the expression on the president’s face”, he would have “thought it was all a joke”.
A version of this article first appeared in the Reliable Sources newsletter. You can register for free here.
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