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FBI Raids John Bolton's Home

FBI raids home of former Trump adviser turned critic John Bolton

Trump’s Revenge Campaign, Live on Morning TV

 



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

 The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

 

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.

FBI searching home of ex-Trump national security adviser John Bolton

Search of Bolton’s Home Shows Uneasy Mix of Retribution and Law Enforcement

 




news analysis

Search of Bolton’s Home Shows Uneasy Mix of Retribution and Law Enforcement

 

It is not clear what evidence the authorities have that John Bolton mishandled classified information, but President Trump’s efforts to punish rivals immediately stoked questions about the investigation.

 

Michael S. Schmidt

By Michael S. Schmidt

Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter who has covered the range of Justice Department and F.B.I. investigations into President Trump and others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-bolton-search-analysis.html

Aug. 22, 2025

 

When federal agents armed with a search warrant showed up at John R. Bolton’s home outside Washington at dawn on Friday, it was a display of one of the government’s most intimidating powers, in this case deployed against a fierce and high-profile critic of President Trump.

 

It is not yet clear what evidence the Justice Department cited in convincing a federal judge to sign off on the search warrant, or what culpability Mr. Bolton might have in an on-and-off investigation into whether he mishandled classified information dating back to when he served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser during the president’s first term.

 

But the episode illustrated how Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution has undercut the principle that law enforcement should keep a substantial distance from politics, stoking questions about whether even legitimate investigations are colored by the president’s insistence on putting his perceived enemies through the same treatment he faced as a target of multiple inquiries.

 

From Mr. Trump’s first term, he was repeatedly warned by aides — including his White House counsel and chief of staff at the time — that he should refrain from publicly accusing his enemies of breaking the law.

 

Among the reasons, aides told him, was that some day, when one of his enemies did do something wrong, the public might not believe it because there would be a perception that the accusation stemmed from Mr. Trump’s drive for retribution.

 

“For all we know, the investigation into John Bolton’s conduct may be rock solid, but Trump’s Justice Department has lost any presumption of regularity,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and a U.S. attorney during the Obama administration.

 

“One of the reasons prosecutors keep their mouths shut about politics is so that if and when investigative activity is undertaken, there will be no appearance of bias,” she said. “In light of all of the threats the Trump administration has made to target his enemies, they have lost any presumption of good faith.”

 

In his seven months back in office, Mr. Trump and his administration have used a whole-of-government approach to go after his perceived enemies as well as people and institutions he sees as impeding his agenda, including academic institutions, news organizations and law firms. In doing so, they have not only in many cases put legal and financial pressure on their targets but also sent broader signals about the hefty costs that criticism of Mr. Trump could incur.

 

In the case of the search of Mr. Bolton’s home, the developments were accompanied by almost gleeful statements from administration officials. Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, who before taking office listed Mr. Bolton as a member of an executive branch “deep state,” posted on social media: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” The deputy F.B.I. director, Dan Bongino, reposted Mr. Patel, saying: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”

 

Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign has long focused on putting his perceived enemies through what he believes he unfairly endured as he was investigated, first by a special counsel during his first term and later by federal and state prosecutors during the Biden administration. In some ways, the search of Mr. Bolton’s home mirrors the F.B.I.’s 2022 search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home and private club, Mar-a-Lago, to retrieve classified documents he had kept and refused to return after leaving office.

 

Executing a search warrant at an individual’s home is considered among federal law enforcement’s greatest powers. It casts the specter of criminality over the person whose home is being searched, as it typically creates scenes of F.B.I. agents — wearing their trademark windbreakers with the bureau’s initials emblazoned on the back — going in and out of the person’s home.

 

Exactly those images were beamed out from coverage at Mr. Bolton’s home on Friday, as journalists assembled outside to provide live updates on the search. Agents later appeared to be entering Mr. Bolton’s office in Washington.

 

For the F.B.I. to have obtained a search warrant, an agent has to provide an affidavit to a federal judge, who would then have to rule that there was probable cause that there was evidence on the premises that a crime had been committed.

 

Mr. Bolton has a long and contentious history with Mr. Trump. He served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, often finding himself at odds with the president and his aides. He documented his experience in a book, “The Room Where it Happened,” which painted the president as an uninformed leader with authoritarian instincts. It was published only after the administration engaged in a lengthy review of whether it contained classified information.

 

A foreign policy hawk, Mr. Bolton is a frequent guest on cable television news, where he typically sharply criticizes Mr. Trump, especially on his handling of Russia, a topic that has been front and center in recent weeks.

 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Mr. Bolton again warned about why he believed Mr. Trump was unfit to be president, although he refused to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

When Mr. Trump returned to power in early 2025, he stacked his administration with officials like Mr. Patel who openly embraced his retribution agenda.

 

During the time Mr. Bolton worked in the first Trump administration, he helped put together plans that led to Mr. Trump ordering the killing of a top Iranian general. Because of Mr. Bolton’s role in those plans, there was intelligence showing that the Iranians wanted to kill him. To protect Mr. Bolton, the federal government provided him with a security detail throughout the Biden administration.

 

But just a day after being sworn in, Mr. Trump stripped Mr. Bolton of his security detail.

 

Despite losing his security, Mr. Bolton continued to publicly take on Mr. Trump, including as the F.B.I. raid occurred on Friday.

 

A correction was made on Aug. 22, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the year President Trump returned to power. It was in early 2025, not 2024.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

 

Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.

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