National Review Online
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
There’s much we don’t know about the FBI search of John
Bolton’s home and the federal investigation that it revealed, but there’s good
cause to be skeptical.
JD Vance, defending the search over the weekend on Meet
the Press, would say only that “classified documents are certainly part of
it” but added ominously, “I think that there’s a broad concern about Ambassador
Bolton.” That formulation makes it sounds more like a personalized grievance
against a fierce Trump critic rather than a dispassionate probe of a particular
violation of the law.
That said, we don’t know what investigators are looking
for, or whether they are on a general fishing expedition or a targeted search
for known wrongdoing. We don’t know if this is a new investigation, one dating
to the Biden administration, or simply an effort to relitigate complaints
investigated five years ago that drafts of Bolton’s June 2020 memoir allegedly
containing classified information (excised before publication) were shared with
people not cleared to read them. Preliminary press reports seem to suggest the
latter.
If so, it’s petty and vindictive for the government to
relaunch a new investigation now. It would be an understatement to say that
federal law enforcement has been profoundly inconsistent and arbitrary over the
past decade in how it treats senior government officials who retain secrets
after their service. Certainly, Bolton would have had no reason in 2020 to
expect that he would be investigated in retaliation for a future
classified-documents probe of his former boss, culminating in the Mar-a-Lago
raid three years ago.
Pro-Trump voices have argued that retributive uses of
lawfare are fair game — they did it to Trump, after all. This is a dangerous
way to think about the coercive power of government, but it also makes little
sense when applied to Bolton. He is a lifelong conservative and a former Trump
official long despised by Democrats and the left. While Democrats have found
his barbed critiques of Trump useful in recent years, he was obviously not a
prosecutor, and not advising Merrick Garland, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, or
Letitia James on how to use, or abuse, the powers of their offices.
The administration already showed that it has it out for
Bolton when it revoked his security detail despite the Iranians’ targeting him
for assassination (for policies he supported in the first Trump term). If the
investigation unearths serious criminal matters, of course, Bolton’s status as
a Trump critic should not insulate him from prosecution. No one is above the
law, but neither should the law be used as an instrument of harassment against
political critics.
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