Federal agents searched the home of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday, targeting one of President Trump’s most outspoken critics.
The FBI confirmed there was “court-authorized law enforcement activity” going on in the area of Bolton’s Maryland home. The search was reportedly related to Bolton’s handling of classified information.
The move marked an escalation of Trump’s feud with Bolton, and it set off alarms for critics of the president who viewed it as a potential act of retribution against a vocal critic.
Here are five things to know about the search.
Related to classified document suspicions
The probe builds on long-standing accusations by Trump that Bolton may have mishandled classified records, including as he wrote a tell-all book about his time in the first Trump administration.
Trump upon taking office for a second time revoked Bolton’s security clearance. It’s a crime even for those with authorized access to remove many sensitive records from their proper setting, something that could run afoul of the Espionage Act.
Agents were seen coming in and out of both Bolton’s Maryland home as well as his D.C. office with boxes Monday.
The FBI has declined to comment on the investigation, and Bolton did not return request for comment.
DOJ dropped previous probe into Bolton’s book
The former national security adviser, who served in multiple other GOP administrations, published a memoir in 2020 titled “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” that offered a damning portrait of Trump as “stunningly uninformed” on how to run the government, foreign policy matters and geopolitics.
Trump previously tried to block Bolton from publishing the book, claiming a National Security Council review of Bolton’s manuscript determined it contained “significant amounts of classified information” and violated a nondisclosure agreement he signed when joining the administration.
But in later litigation, a judge declined to block its publication.
Bolton faced criticism in the lead-up to the release of the 2020 book. Judge Royce C. Lamberth declined to block its publication but said that the former ambassador “likely published classified materials” with the sped-up release of the memoir.
“Defendant Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States. He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability,” the judge said in 2020.
Bolton argued at the time Trump’s interest in the book wasn’t about protecting intelligence but rather to conceal its deeply negative portrait of Trump ahead of the 2020 election.
After Trump lost the 2020 race to former President Biden, the Justice Department dropped both ongoing litigation efforts as well as a criminal probe that the first Trump Justice Department had launched into the book.
Bolton’s attorney, Charles J. Cooper, said at the time that by dropping the lawsuit, the government had “tacitly acknowledged that President Trump and his White House officials acted illegitimately.”
Escalates long-running feud with Trump
Bolton served as Trump’s third national security adviser during his first term, a role he held for 17 months before Trump ousted him.
In the years since, Bolton has remained one of the most outspoken critics of his old boss. He has weighed in on Trump’s foreign policy, his handling of classified documents and his rhetoric about U.S. elections.
At a time when prominent Trump critics receded into the background or were reluctant to speak out for fear of retribution, Bolton was a regular fixture on cable news programs.
Trump has repeatedly targeted Bolton with insults. In 2020, he suggested Bolton should go to jail for publishing his book, alleging it contained classified material.
The president revoked Bolton’s Secret Service protection earlier this year; Bolton has faced assassination threats from Iran due to his hawkish stance toward the Middle Eastern country.
On Friday, Trump dismissed Bolton as “a real sort of lowlife,” “not a smart guy” and someone who “could be a very unpatriotic guy.”
“He doesn’t talk. He’s like a very quiet person,” Trump said Friday. “Except on television, where he can say something bad about Trump. He’ll always do that.”
Patel criticized for cryptic X post
FBI Director Kash Patel shared a cryptic message Friday morning as reports of the raid emerged.
“NO ONE is above the law…@FBI agents on mission,” Patel said on social platform X, not mentioning anyone by name.
Similarly, Patel’s deputy at the FBI, Dan Bongino, reposted the remarks and added, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”
The FBI declined to comment when reached for a response by The Hill about the meaning of the posts.
Patel received criticism from former FBI officials.
Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the FBI who is now an analyst on CNN and has hammered the bureau’s leadership under the Trump administration, said the X post was “yet another example of, in my opinion, Kash Patel failing to live up to the example of his predecessors.”
“This is not the kind of thing that any FBI director has ever done. FBI directors don’t gratuitously point toward search warrants and the people who are targets of those warrants,” McCabe said Friday morning on CNN.
Ex-FBI agent Phil Andrew said to NewsNation’s “Morning in America” that top FBI officials normally refrain from talking about probes to protect agents and the integrity of the case.
“It is odd and way out of the FBI’s natural practice for the FBI director to be commenting on this on Twitter as a raid is taking place, and clearly there’s been a lot of politicalization of the FBI by this director and his deputy,” Andrew told host Markie Martin.
“It’s unprecedented. We don’t see directors, we don’t see agents talking about investigations,” Andrew said. “That is for the protection of the agents; it’s for the protection of the investigation and the integrity of the investigation. So, he’s already clouding whatever this is by making this kind of cryptic comment.”
Echoes of FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home
The search of Bolton’s home has parallels with the controversial FBI review of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which was also conducted on an early August morning with the aim of retrieving classified materials.
In Trump’s case, FBI agents also secured a warrant after repeated attempts to get him to hand over records from Trump’s presidency, leading to the 2022 discovery of 300 records with classified markings on them.
Patel has said the Mar-a-Lago search was unlawful.
“There was no crime, there was no predicate to go and invade Donald Trump’s home. We have answered that definitively,” he told Fox Business earlier this week.
He also routinely bashed the FBI’s handling of the matter before Trump selected him to lead the agency.
“Those same criminal gangsters at the FBI and DOJ are running this Mar-a-Lago raid investigation,” Patel told his listeners in 2022 on his show, “Kash’s Corner.”
Bongino at the time called the search a “freaking disgrace.”
“The FBI is a fully now corrupt organization,” Bongino said in 2022 when discussing the search. “This agency serves no good purpose anymore. The agency needs to be disbanded.”
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