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.