(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Last week, the FBI—under the aegis of the Department of Justice—raided John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump during his first term. And they raided his home and his house. And they took away documents, which allegedly, the target of the raid were these documents.
Bolton was not arrested. He was not indicted. There was no effort aimed at him personally. But the accusation, apparently, was that he had removed classified documents.
Almost immediately, the Left and the “Never Trump” Right, said, “See, we told you Donald Trump is on a revenge tour. First it was John Brennan, and then James Clapper, then James Comey. He’ll go after Anthony Fauci. Anybody that doesn’t have a pardon is fair game.”
But there’s more to the story than that. In 2019, when Trump fired John Bolton as national security adviser, he was writing a book. And he sold that book on the premise that he had been in the room. The title was, essentially, “This happened in the room” or “What happened in the room.” And he took prodigious notes.
So, he was supposed to be this anti-Trump, high-level appointee and famous in the conservative circles as a war hawk and interventionist. But he had intimate knowledge about how Donald Trump functioned abroad with major allies and enemies and rivals and neutrals and how he was at home. And he wrote this damning book, memoir about Trump.
The Trump DOJ said, “He’s just trying to write this right during the campaign season. And he’s a surrogate for the Biden campaign, in his bitterness. He’s angry. But more importantly, he is using this classified information through the filter of the notes he took and he is going to hurt U.S. national security.”
So, they filed, the DOJ, a motion to stop the publication.
The book was almost out. A federal judge, Royce Lamberth, looked at it and he thought—he basically said, “Well, I can’t really stop the book. It’s gonna be released in a few days.” But in kind of a rare excursus, he said, “John Bolton, you’re doing something wrong. You are violating, likely, national security laws. And if you don’t stop, you’ll be subject, at some point, to criminal prosecution.” And then he let it rest.
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Then the DOJ kept investigating. Donald Trump lost the election. During the transition, they looked at it—the Biden transition. When President Joe Biden came into office, they dropped it by June. Six months.
So now the question is, did they go in to get these documents last week because they were on a revenge tour? Retribution against Bolton because he’s been all over left-wing cable news, specifically CNN and, more importantly, MSNBC. And he’s been blasting Donald Trump on everything: the Iran bombing, the Ukraine war, using federal troops in Washington. And therefore, he made himself a target. And this is “old hat,” that he says. “Everybody has adjudicated this.”
There’s two things to watch to see whether Bolton is accurate. But I would, before I’d finish, by talking about those two criteria. I will say that when Donald Trump’s home was raided on Aug. 9, 2022, John Bolton spoke out. And he said, “Let’s not prejudge, you,” basically, you pro-Trumpers, “let’s just let all the evidence, you know, be seen before we make snap judgments.” Meaning, you know, he’s probably guilty.
But more importantly, then he said, “Donald Trump was just—anything that came across his desk. He saw french fries, he got ’em. He saw classified documents, he did, just because he could.” And then on another occasion, “He has no respect for classification. And that’s a lie, that he personally classified these.”
So, he was very critical of anybody who objected to what he thought was an FBI-legitimate raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Now it’s ironic. We’ll see if he uses the same tropes and themes to protect himself in the way that he blasted Trump about a similar raid. But what we’re looking at is to see if it was justified or whether it was vengeful. And if it’s just about an old matter four years ago that the Biden administration, for political reasons, dropped, but a federal judge said, “You know what? There’s something there,“ but it was dropped, to go back and rehash that I don’t think is gonna be worth it.
And maybe it was a vengeful shot across the bow to Bolton. He probably wouldn’t be charged. But also, to other people like Comey and Clapper and Brennan, Fauci, Mark Milley: “All of you, be careful. You’ve done something wrong and we’re gonna investigate you. And that’s gonna cost you a lot of money for legal counsel.” That would not be good, if that were true.
But here’s why I don’t think it’s quite like that. To get the FBI’s permission to go into the Bolton home, you had to have two different federal judges examine the request—the permission to enter the Bolton home and office. And they did give it. And they’re disinterested third parties.
Second, why did the Biden administration drop this investigation? They never even told us. And apparently, they dropped it because Bolton had become an ally of the Left. And they did not want to put him in legal jeopardy.
And third, and finally, there were leaks, rumors that the FBI went in there not to examine the old charges of his notes that were used improperly to write his critical anti-Trump book, but because there had been allegations, for a long time, that John Bolton transferred classified information. That doesn’t mean he downloaded attachments, necessarily—CIA or FBI analyses or national security assessments. It just meant that he was trying to transfer some information that he should not to his family, as if he could evade surveillance by intelligence authorities of any impropriety.
If he did that and he actually—as some of the rumors say—then it’s a different story. That would be new information.
And that would mean that John Bolton—maybe to write his notes, maybe to enhance his career as a consultant, or think tanker, or as an author, or just a gadfly—was going back and looking at things that transpired during his first-term service. And it was only a year. But nevertheless, to chronicle it, he didn’t just write it down in his notebook, which could be found and subpoenaed, but he sent emails to particular people, namely his family, to memorialize that. If that’s true, he has legal jeopardy.
So it’s either, likely, something that should not have happened—a vengeful tour, revenge, retribution, payback. I think, more likely, there’s something there or two—as I said—two federal judges would not have given permission to look. And if he did transfer files that were classified, the penalties fall under the Espionage Act. And they can be over 10 to 20 years in imprisonment.
So, we’ll see what’s going to happen. But meanwhile, the Left is alleging retribution. And the Trump DOJ and FBI said, “Just hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Wait till you read the actual request for an intervention or so-called raid. And let’s see what we found and then make an assessment.”
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