FBI Raids John Bolton: Why? : The Other McCain

August 22, 2025

Posted on | August 22, 2025 | No Comments

The big news today raises some intriguing questions. While we must assume that there is legal justification for the FBI’s raid on John Bolton — probable cause to suspect him of illegal activity — the same could be said of dozens of others whose names might be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. That is to say, if this is about Trump getting even with enemies (which of course, most people in the news media just automatically assume to be the case), why start the reprisals with Bolton?

Well, let’s get to some of the facts first:

FBI agents raided the Maryland home and Washington, DC office of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton Friday morning in a high-profile national security probe involving classified documents.
Federal agents went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post.
“NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” Patel said in a cryptic post to X shortly after the raid began.
Bolton has not been arrested and is not currently charged with any crimes, the official added.
“He’s not a smart guy, but he could be a very unpatriotic guy,” President Trump told reporters of Bolton Friday morning. “We’re going to find out.”
The raid came at the behest of Patel, with the president claiming that he had no advance knowledge of the operation.
“I know nothing about it. I just saw it this morning … I tell [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] and I tell the group: ‘I don’t want to know, but you have to do what you have to do. I don’t want to know about it.’”
“I could know about it. I could be the one starting — and I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer — but I feel that it’s better this way.”
An investigation of Bolton was launched in 2020, but the Biden administration shut it down “for political reasons,” according to a senior US official.
Trump’s first Justice Department initiated a criminal inquiry into Bolton’s alleged disclosure of national secrets in his 2020 book, “The Room Where It Happened.”
However, officials tell The Post that the current investigation is not limited to Bolton’s book — but is part of a “larger classified leaking probe that extended into the Biden administration.”

OK, so there are some possible clues there. Is it really fair to assume that the motivation for the raid on Bolton is essentially political in nature, as so many people seem to be doing? If we stipulate this, for the sake of argument, we must still ask why Bolton? Why not James Comey, John Brennan, Susan Rice, et al.? Consider a couple of possible explanations:

A. Bolton’s activities were so egregious as to warrant this action. In other words, Bolton has done something so bad that Kash Patel believed the FBI needed to conduct this raid to prevent further damage to national security.
B. There is so much evidence of Bolton’s wrongdoing, and so much reason to believe more evidence would be found in this raid, that Patel saw it as an “open-and-shut” case, a slam-dunk prosecution where there could be no doubt of Bolton’s guilt.

These two theories are not mutually exclusive, of course, but I would lean toward Theory B as most likely. If Kash Patel is henceforth going to be dragging Trump’s enemies into court, to hold them accountable for their roles in what Tulsi Gabbard has called a “seditious conspiracy,” it helps his credibility if he can start with a slam-dunk case. And it also helps Patel that Bolton is seen as a Republican-leaning figure, picked to serve in both of the two most recent GOP administrations.

All this is speculation on my part, but if my hunch is right, we can expect a grand jury indictment of Bolton in just a few weeks — perhaps as early as next month — and the charging document will contain allegations (and references to evidence) that look very, very bad for John Bolton, so bad that even the most anti-Trump analyst on CNN won’t defend him.

America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always. https://t.co/Feev4Cxqlj

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) August 22, 2025