Federal agents on Friday searched the Maryland home and Washington office of John Bolton, the former national security adviser who broke publicly with President Donald Trump in his first administration, as part of a Justice Department investigation into the handling of classified material, according to multiple news reports.
The court-authorized searches mark a dramatic escalation in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of one of the president’s most outspoken critics from within his own party. Bolton, who served 17 months in the White House before being dismissed in 2019, was neither detained nor charged, the reports said.
The investigation makes Bolton the latest in a growing list of Trump’s political adversaries to be targeted by the Justice Department since the President returned to office in January. In recent months, federal prosecutors have opened inquiries targeting New York Attorney General Letitia James, who pursued civil fraud claims against Trump’s company; Sen. Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, a leading figure in Trump’s first impeachment; and former FBI director James Comey. All have denied wrongdoing.
The Justice Department has declined to comment publicly on the search, but its leaders appeared to allude to the operation in social media posts. FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Attorney General Pam Bondi reposted the message, adding, “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”
The precise focus of the Bolton investigation remains unclear, though it is believed to concern a potential mishandling or retention of national security information. Trump had previously threatened to jail Bolton over his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which depicted Trump as uninformed on foreign policy and driven primarily by personal political gain. The Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr sought to block the book’s release, claiming it contained classified information, but career officials had cleared the manuscript, and the case was dropped under the Biden Administration in 2021.
Trump has repeatedly attacked his onetime adviser, deriding him as a “warmonger” who could have led the country into “World War Six.” On his first day back in the Oval Office in January, Trump revoked security clearances from more than four dozen former intelligence officials, including Bolton. Trump also canceled Bolton’s Secret Service protection, despite the fact that the Justice Department had said he was the target of an alleged murder-for-hire scheme by a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Bolton also served as United Nations ambassador under President George W. Bush and held positions in President Ronald Reagan’s administration. As national security adviser, he frequently clashed with Trump over Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.
Earlier this month, Trump complained that the media was “constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton.”
In an ABC News interview this month, Bolton described the current administration as “a retribution presidency,” saying Trump had “already come after” him by stripping away his security detail.
In 2023, the Biden Justice Department charged Trump with illegally mishandling classified documents, alleging that Trump broke the law by taking the classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving office in January 2021, showing off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map, and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the documents. Last year, Jack Smith, who was the Department of Justice Special Counsel at the time, filed to drop the charges after Trump’s reelection.
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