The president is still playing with fire.

T he “retribution” president’s latest lawfare sortie is a Friday morning FBI raid of the Washington, D.C.–area home of John Bolton, his former national security adviser and, ever since, a harsh Trump critic.

This appears to arise out of the feud over Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened (2020), about his time in the Trump administration. Trump fired Bolton in September 2019, and Bolton rushed to get the book out — which required a classified information review by the Trump-45 intelligence community — prior to the 2020 election. The book depicted Trump as incompetent and unfit for the presidency. It is very lengthy and includes quotations from conversations about highly sensitive topics — crossing into the area of what in intel-speak is referred to as information “born classified.”

Those who’ve worked with Bolton observe that he is a copious notetaker. In the government, if an official participates in a meeting about topics that are classified and takes notes contemporaneously, or even afterwards, the notes are deemed classified at whatever the classification level of the topics discussed is. The controversy over the book involved (a) whether Bolton maintained classified information (e.g., his notes) in non-approved spaces while hastily writing it, and (b) whether the book compromised intelligence information, including methods and sources.

Bolton maintained that he destroyed any classified notes that were in his possession, consistent with the practice of intelligence officials. Under that practice, classified notes (like other classified documents) must be maintained in a storage facility appropriate for the level(s) of classification at issue, and then destroyed — usually burned — in a regular process, using tightly secured “burn bags” that are destroyed by security staffers.

During his first administration, after Bolton became a voluble anti-Trump source for the media, President Trump had aides go to court to stop the publication of Bolton’s book, alleging that it contained classified information that he had not gotten approval to publish.

This was a controversial issue. In a nutshell, Bolton appeared to have gotten a signal from National Security Council (NSC) official Ellen Knight that the intelligence community’s pre-publication review of the book was complete and the book was approved for publication — i.e., it had been found not to contain classified information. This approval, however, was not a formal, final green light. Based on what he’d been told, Bolton and his publishers forged ahead with the printing of the books, obviously seeking to publish in the run-up to the election when press and public interest in it would be intense.

The Trump White House, however, assigned John Ellis, an NSC lawyer, to review Bolton’s manuscript. In the current Trump administration, Ellis is the deputy director of the CIA, and his involvement here is worth pausing over.

Prior to joining the first Trump administration, Ellis worked for Devin Nunes, the Republican former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, where his top aide was Kash Patel. Both Nunes and Patel are close to the president — the former is now the chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and chief executive officer of the Trump Media and Technology Group (the parent of Truth Social); the latter is the director of the FBI, which executed the warrant at Bolton’s home this morning.

Ellis concluded that the manuscript contained classified information. When the first Trump administration filed a lawsuit seeking to block publication of the book, General Paul Nakasone, then the NSC director, went further, filing an affidavit that said a portion of Bolton’s draft “implicates” information classified at the highest level, the compromise of which “could result in the permanent loss of a valuable [signal intelligence] source and cause irreparable damage to the U.S. [signal intelligence] system.” (I am quoting from a Washington Post report, which includes the brackets. “Signal intelligence” generally refers to forms of electronic monitoring, as distinguished from “human intelligence,” which refers to informants and undercover agents.)

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., ultimately denied the government’s motion to block publication of the book because publicity about the memoir had already begun and more than 200,000 copies had been shipped. Judge Lamberth, however, opined that Bolton had “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potential criminal) liability.” The Post elaborates that the court also gave Bolton’s defense opportunity to pursue their claims that Trump officials had improperly delayed and influenced classification decisions.

In the chaotic closing weeks of the Trump-45 administration, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of Bolton on suspicion of feloniously mishandling classified information. Five months after the Biden administration took over, the grand jury investigation was closed, and both DOJ and Bolton agreed to drop the civil litigation over the book (in which the first Trump administration had sought to claw back Bolton’s profits from sales).

Meantime, Ellis — who, in the chaotic closing days of the last Trump administration, had been installed as NSC general counsel over General Nakasone’s objection — was removed from the NSC and soon resigned. In the Trump-47 administration, he has served as deputy CIA director (a non-confirmation post) since February.

Obviously, the Trump Justice Department, which has a growing lawfare practice of investigating Trump’s political enemies, has reopened the criminal investigation of Bolton. FBI Director Patel, in an unseemly real-time social media post on X shortly after this morning’s raid, stated, “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on a mission.”

So much for the presumption of innocence and the Justice Department’s obligation to honor the civil rights of persons under investigation. I’ll end the same way I ended yesterday’s column, by observing that President Trump

is playing with fire in seeking retribution against his tormentors by using the very same lawfare tactics. He can have a much more successful presidency if he accepts that he got his retribution by winning the election. If he adopts his enemies’ tactics, he’s apt to end up with their results, too.