Bolton says it's pointless for Trump to try to stop his book now, after 200,000 copies have been shipped and its contents have been reported everywhere

• Lawyers for John Bolton said Thursday that President Donald Trump's attempts to block publication of his book were futile.
• In a legal filing they said 200,000 copies had already shipped, and they noted that the media had been full of reports of its contents.
• The Trump administration is trying to secure a court order to stop the book from being published, with a hearing scheduled for Friday.
• Bolton's response said Trump "cannot plausibly argue that Ambassador Bolton has power to stop the Amazon delivery trucks in America, unshelve the copies in Europe, commandeer the copies in Canada."

John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, said Thursday that attempts by the White House to block publication of his book were pointless because it was already widely distributed and its contents were widely known.

The Trump administration is scrambling to stop the release of Bolton's new book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," and a court hearing is scheduled for Friday in Washington, DC.

Bolton's book alleges incompetence and malpractice by the president that Bolton says he witnessed firsthand during his tenure from April 2018 to September 2019.

It includes claims that Trump tried to solicit the help of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the 2020 election and thought Finland was part of Russia rather than an independent country, even though he had been there.

Business Insider has rounded up the most explosive claims.

The Trump administration claims that the book contains classified information. It has also said parts of it are untrue.

In a document filed late Thursday, lawyers for Bolton argued that Trump's request to stop the publication of the book was effectively pointless because Bolton no longer had the power to do so.

It said more than 200,000 copies had already been distributed to warehouses and some to individual consumers. It also argued that neither Bolton nor the publisher Simon & Schuster had the ability to get them back.

It also gestured to reports in news outlets around the world that had reported the contents of Bolton's book based on review copies and excerpts. Business Insider is among these.

A portion of the document, reviewed by Business Insider, says:

"The Government cannot plausibly argue that Ambassador Bolton has power to stop the Amazon delivery trucks in America, unshelve the copies in Europe, commandeer the copies in Canada, and repossess the copies sent to reviewers or in the possession of major newspapers.

"Nor has the Government provided any evidence or given any reason to expect that hundreds of booksellers and reviewers with copies of the book have any legal obligation to return their copies of the book or that they would voluntarily do so if Ambassador Bolton or Simon & Schuster asked them to do so."

You can read the rest of Business Insider's coverage of Bolton and his book here.