By Shane Harris
Friday, August 22, 2025
FBI directors don’t customarily announce raids in
progress. But early this morning, Kash Patel celebrated the search of former
National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home as agents were rolling into his
suburban-Maryland driveway: “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,”
Patel wrote on X. Agents also executed a search warrant at Bolton’s office in
Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump later told reporters that he had
learned about the raid on one of his most voluble critics from TV news, but he
took the opportunity to call Bolton a “lowlife” and “not a smart guy.” Then he
added: “Could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”
The FBI’s actions were hard not to read as payback for
Bolton’s years of criticism of the president, even as the facts that persuaded
a judge to approve a search warrant remain unknown. That’s the problem with a
politicized legal system—even if an investigation is legitimate, it’s easy to
assume that its motives are corrupt. Trump has spent years vowing retribution
against Bolton, particularly after Bolton published a 2020 memoir
that portrayed the president as incompetent and out of his depth on foreign
policy.
If this was revenge, it wasn’t an isolated act. As agents
were still packing up boxes of Bolton’s effects, The Washington Post reported
that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had pushed out yet another senior military
officer, firing Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency. In June, its analysts delivered a preliminary assessment
that U.S. bombers had caused relatively limited damage to Iranian nuclear
facilities, undercutting Trump’s pronouncements that the sites were
“obliterated.” And just three days ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi
Gabbard revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and
former national-security officials. Several played key roles in efforts to
counter or expose Russia’s 2016 election interference, what Trump calls the
“Russia Hoax” and Gabbard has described as part of a “years-long coup” against
the president.
Put it all together, and this may be remembered as the
week Trump’s campaign against the “deep state” kicked into high gear. To some
intelligence professionals I spoke with, it felt as though something
fundamental had shifted in their historically apolitical line of work.
“Given the dystopian nature of it all—clearance
revocations of former officials who did no wrong, forced retirements of
long-standing intelligence officials, reductions in force that include junior
officers who were just hired, and a wildly politicized leadership in the
intelligence community—I no longer recommend young Americans to pursue careers
in intelligence,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer who had his own
security clearance yanked earlier this year, told me.
Purge doesn’t adequately capture what
national-security experts see happening here. Chilling effect is too
mild, though revoking the security clearances of two senior intelligence
officers, as Gabbard did, effectively ending their government careers, will
indeed send a message. Terrorizing the workforce is a phrase I heard a
lot this week. And that may indeed be the point.
“Instead of being honest about what we think, now people
will just keep their mouths shut or tell Trump what he wants to hear,” said one
former official, who would only speak anonymously. The administration publicly
identified this person as part of the “Russia Hoax,” and they’ve hired personal
security for outside their home, fearing that Trump’s most fevered supporters
might pay a visit.
Forget about calling out misbehavior or wrongdoing by
administration officials, the person added: “Where would we go to file a
grievance, or to report misconduct? Who’s going to do that?”
Gabbard’s office did not respond to my request for
comment.
One current official described the mood among career
intelligence officers as “panicked.” In this person’s agency, three senior
officials were abruptly placed on administrative leave this week. One of them
has been involved in efforts to counter foreign threats against U.S. elections,
which the administration has scaled back.
Gabbard’s actions have also raised concerns about
separation of powers. She revoked the clearances of at least two congressional
staffers. It will be difficult for them to perform their oversight of the
executive branch without access to classified information.
***
Bolton was in his Washington office as the FBI conducted
its search, according to a person close to him. He did not respond to a request
for comment. Bolton was investigated during the first Trump administration and
during the Biden administration over his book, The Room Where It Happened.
He had submitted the manuscript for a prepublication review in early 2020, and
after a lengthy back-and-forth with government officials, he made changes to
address concerns about the possible disclosure of classified information. That
effectively made it suitable for publication, according to a detailed statement
from the official who led the review.
But in a highly unusual maneuver, the Trump White House
ordered a second review by an administration official, who concluded that the
manuscript was full of classified information. (That official, Michael Ellis,
is now deputy director of the CIA.) The official in charge of the earlier
review disagreed and concluded that the administration was trying to silence a
political critic and was trampling his First Amendment rights.
Bolton published the book anyway. Federal investigators
looked into whether he had illegally disclosed classified information. But
Bolton was never charged. It’s possible some new evidence of a potential crime
has emerged, leading to today’s FBI raid. But the administration’s hostility
toward Bolton is well known, and Trump has made no secret of the fact that,
seeing himself as the victim of political prosecutions during the Biden years,
he is eager to turn the tables on perceived enemies. A senior U.S. official
told the New York Post that the Biden administration had shut down the
probe into Bolton “for political reasons.”
“That’s nonsense,” a former senior Justice Department
official told me. “No decision in any case was ever made for political reasons.
These accusations are obviously made in bad faith, and honestly, that’s what
happens when you have people making decisions with basically no experience with
complex national- security investigations. They have no clue what they’re
talking about.”
There are still officials working in the government who
took part in the 2016 efforts to counter Russia. Has the White House overlooked
them? Are they next on the list to be purged? Everyone is left to wonder. But
no one thinks that the president’s retribution campaign is anywhere near its
end.
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