The United States government on Wednesday asked a federal court to issue an emergency order to stop the release of a book written by President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, in which he claimed that Trump “pleaded” with China’s Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected, AP reported.

Bolton’s 577-page book titled “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” is set to be released on June 23. According to an excerpt published in The New York Times, Bolton claimed that the conversation between Trump and Xi took place during the G20 summit in Japan’s Osaka city in 2019.

The ex-Trump advisor said that at the summit, Xi complained that some critics of China in the US were calling for a new cold war. “Trump, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton said in his book. “He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

Bolton also added that the two leaders spoke about the construction of camps in China’s western Xinjiang region to detain Uighur Muslims. Trump told Xi that the construction should continue as it was “exactly the right thing to do”, Bolton added.

In his book, Bolton has also talked about the impeachment proceedings against Trump. The US president had pressured his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to launch a corruption probe into his political rival Joe Biden and his son. He was, however, acquitted after a two-week trial. Bolton claimed the impeachment inquiry might have led to a different outcome this year if it had looked at other instances of alleged political interference.

At one point in the book, Bolton recalled Trump as saying that reporters should have to reveal their sources or face imprisonment. “These people should be executed. They are scumbags,” Trump was quoted as saying in the book.

Bolton was fired from his post by Trump last year amid disagreements over the country’s foreign policy in North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Russia. He was known to have persuaded Trump to not stop pressuring North Korea despite diplomatic efforts.