Opinion
The
Editorial Board
Trump’s
Revenge Campaign, Live on Morning TV
Aug. 22,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/opinion/trump-john-bolton-raid.html
By The
Editorial Board
Less than
12 hours after President Trump’s inauguration in January, he revoked the
security detail protecting John Bolton, his former national security adviser
turned critic, despite credible threats from Iran. Since then, Mr. Trump has
repeatedly ridiculed Mr. Bolton on social media, including by calling him one
of the “stupid people” making it harder to end the Ukraine war. The president
has also continued his yearslong accusations that Mr. Bolton leaked classified
information, without offering any evidence.
None of
Mr. Trump’s pressure tactics stopped Mr. Bolton from pointing out the
president’s many foreign policy failures. On Thursday evening, Mr. Bolton was
back on CNN, saying that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had managed to
“roll” Mr. Trump at their recent Alaska summit, and criticizing the
administration for being unable to explain the outcome of the summit or the
future of peace talks.
On Friday
morning, the intimidation ratcheted up several notches. At dawn, the F.B.I.
conducted a search of Mr. Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., and his office in
Washington. Agents carried out boxes of papers and put them into vehicles with
flashing blue lights in front of the amassed cameras. The Times reported that
officials were investigating whether Mr. Bolton had improperly leaked national
security information to the news media and other parties to damage the Trump
administration. Mr. Bolton, notably, has not held government office in six
years.
It is too
early to know what the F.B.I. will claim to find in all of those boxes but not
too early to surmise that the search for incriminating documents was not the
real goal of Friday’s search. Even if it turns up documents that should not be
there, the administration has damaged any presumption of good faith by flinging
weightless accusations of criminality at those who challenge it. That approach
was evident in the snide social media posts that accompanied the search. “NO
ONE is above the law,” wrote Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “@FBI agents on
mission.” Mr. Patel’s deputy Dan Bongino jumped to an accusation of guilt with
his response: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.” And Attorney General
Pam Bondi declared: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be
pursued. Always.”
The
search is a new chapter in Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against his
critics. The White House and its loyalists in the Justice Department and the
F.B.I. are sending a clear message: Keep quiet, or we will use the
extraordinary power of federal law enforcement to threaten your job or your
liberty and put you under a lasting cloud of suspicion. And they are using the
fearsome punitive authority of the government to conduct this campaign.
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Mr. Trump
has accused former President Barack Obama of “treason,” claiming his
predecessor was behind the effort to reveal how Russia helped Mr. Trump’s 2016
campaign. “He’s guilty,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Obama in July, acting as both
judge and jury. Almost immediately the Justice Department created a task force
to investigate the allegation. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who
brought two federal indictments against Mr. Trump, is now under a federal
investigation after Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, accused him of
violating the Hatch Act.
The White
House is also using accusations of mortgage fraud against three people for whom
Mr. Trump holds special grievances. The F.B.I. has begun a criminal
investigation into whether Letitia James, the attorney general of New York and
a Democrat, lied on mortgage documents. Ms. James, who denied the charge, won a
fraud judgment against Mr. Trump in a state court last year. (This week a New
York appellate court tossed out the half-billion-dollar fine against him as
excessive but upheld the judgment.) The Justice Department has even issued a
subpoena to Ms. James for records related to her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, an
extraordinary intrusion into a state legal matter that directly affects Ms.
Bondi’s boss.
The
second target is Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and an outspoken
adversary of Mr. Trump, whom the president has accused of similar deception on
a mortgage application; a federal investigation is underway. The third is Lisa
Cook, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve (appointed by President Joe
Biden), whom Mr. Trump threatened to fire on Friday, claiming the grounds of
mortgage deception. The allegations initially came from Bill Pulte, Mr. Trump’s
appointee as the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who has not explained
how Ms. Cook’s federal mortgage application came to his attention. The move
fits with Mr. Trump’s intention to take control of the central bank, despite
its independence from the executive.
It is
possible none of these investigations will result in a criminal charge. Still,
they can do great harm to their targets. The cost of mounting a defense can be
ruinous, and in some cases the reputational damage can be impossible to fix.
Whatever the outcome, they instill fear in anyone who might consider
challenging the president, and they erode trust in the justice system.
Mr. Trump
seems convinced that he is doing nothing to his rivals that was not done to him
in earlier prosecutions and lawsuits. That is untrue. There is little
comparison between the substantial evidence amassed in his cases — in
particular, that he tried to break the nation’s election laws in 2020 and
refused to return classified White House documents — and the frequent lack of
evidence lobbed at his adversaries.
We do not
pretend to know how any of these cases will turn out. But it is clear that Mr.
Trump and his appointees are perverting the justice system to serve their
political interests and intimidate their critics. Given this pattern, Mr.
Bolton and the rest of Mr. Trump’s targets deserve every benefit of the doubt.
Despite the justice system’s many imperfections, Americans long had reason to
trust that federal officials would not target people for investigations without
evidence. Under the Trump administration, that assumption is disappearing. The
president has given all Americans reason to believe that justice is now applied
selectively and unfairly.
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