Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM.

A federal judge in Washington has scheduled arguments for Friday over the Trump administration's bid to block former national security adviser John Bolton from releasing a damning tell-all memoir about his White House tenure.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a more than 30-year veteran of Washington's federal trial court, set the proceeding a day after the Justice Department asked for a temporary restraining order to halt publication of the memoir on the grounds that it contains classified information.

As details from the book have emerged ahead of its planned release, President Donald Trump has denounced Bolton as "washed up" and called his memoir a "compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad." But his attacks on the book's accuracy have been belied by his own administration's claims that the disclosure of Bolton's memoir "damage the national security of the United States."

"The United States asks this court to hold [Bolton] to the legal obligations he freely assumed as a condition of receiving access to classified information and prevent the harm to national security that will result if his manuscript is published to the world," the Justice Department said Wednesday.

In that court filing, the Justice Department sought an emergency order preventing the book's distribution and asked Lamberth to set a hearing for Friday. The filing marked an escalation of the Trump administration's effort to halt the release of the memoir, coming a day after an initial filing by the Justice Department asked a judge to seize Bolton's proceeds from the book, "The Room Where It Happened," but stopped short of seeking emergency action.

While the Justice Department named only Bolton in its lawsuit, it said in Wednesday's filing that it wants any order barring the book's release to also bind his publisher, Simon & Schuster. The book is set for release on Tuesday.

Simon & Schuster dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit as "a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility."

Less than an hour before Lamberth scheduled Friday's hearing, Bolton's lawyer, Chuck Cooper, entered an appearance on his behalf in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Cooper, of the Washington firm Cooper & Kirk, had previously represented Bolton as House Democrats pursued his testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry.

Bolton never ultimately testified.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Theodore Boutrous characterized the Trump administration's lawsuit as a "paper tiger, designed for a showy roar of outrage but with little prospect of any real bite." Boutrous predicted that the lawsuit "is almost certain to fail to achieve Trump's quest to block publication of the book."

"Instead," he wrote, "the complaint on its face demonstrates that this is just the latest example of Trump flouting the First Amendment and manipulating and abusing the national security apparatus for personal and political purposes to hide information of great public concern from the American people."

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