WASHINGTON: A US judge refused Saturday to block the release of a tell-all book in which President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser describes him as corrupt and incompetent.

With the book already shipped to stores for sale next week, Judge Royce Lambert wrote that John Bolton appeared to have failed to get written White House agreement that his memoir contained nothing classified.

“While Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns, the government has not established that an injunction is an appropriate remedy,” the judge wrote.

The judge said a review of passages that the government contends contain classified material has persuaded him that Bolton “likely jeopardized national security through publication.”

The book, entitled “The Room Where it Happened,” has been widely shipped to bookstores for publication Tuesday and many of its most damning allegations against Trump have been reported in the media.

It is Bolton’s portrait of 17 months up close with Trump, until he was ousted in September.

The picture — which Trump characterizes as “fiction” — is ugly.

According to Bolton, a lifelong Republican who stands firmly on the right of the party, Trump is not “fit for office.”

He describes Trump “pleading” with Chinese President Xi Jinping during trade negotiations to boost his chances of re-election this November by buying more US farm products to help Trump win votes in agricultural states.

Trump said Saturday Bolton would pay a "big price" for what the president described as an illegal tell-all memoir.

"Bolton broke the law and has been called out and rebuked for so doing, with a really big price to pay," Trump tweeted after a judge declined to block release of the book but said Bolton had likely endangered national security by including classified material.

"He likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them. Now he will have bombs dropped on him!" Trump added of the famously hawkish Bolton, without elaborating on what action his administration might take.