sábado, 23 de agosto de 2025
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
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.
Sign up
for the Opinion Today newsletter Get
expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world
every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
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.
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.