The FBI’s search of Trump critic John Bolton’s home didn’t sit well with two legal experts on Fox News, one of whom called it a “very sad development.”
The raid of the former Trump administration National Security Adviser’s Maryland residence and Washington, D.C. office was conducted early Friday morning as part of a search for classified records. A previous investigation into material used for Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened was closed in 2021 without charges being brought.
Fox News contributor and lawyer Andy McCarthy said he was disappointed by the dramatic escalation of an “ancient feud.”
“This is a very sad development. It’s one we’ve seen again and again, but this is an ancient feud. It’s all, I think, over Bolton’s book,” McCarthy said, recapping how that episode was ultimately resolved.
The former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York later said he had hoped that the Trump administration would be above doing what it did Friday.
“I was hoping that his administration wouldn’t practice the things that were practiced on him, but a big part of lawfare is to harass people with investigations,” McCarthy said.
“So even if there are never any charges, there’s going to be—there’s already been—a search warrant. There’s obviously a criminal investigation that’s underway. There’ll probably be a grand jury component of it,” he said. “And even if there’s no charges, this will be a very big deal for Bolton personally in the coming months, and maybe even years.”
Trump, who in 2020 called for Bolton to be jailed, claimed Friday that he wasn’t aware of the raid before it happened. Yet he added: “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, but I feel that it’s better this way.”
The attorney general—not the president—is the chief law enforcement officer.
A few hours after McCarthy voiced his concerns, Fox News contributor Paul Mauro pointed at one thing that gave him pause.
“All I would say is this: We don’t know what the derivation of this was yet. They could have been looking at something completely different and encountered this, and said, ‘Wait a minute? John Bolton’s name is coming up in this?’ Because it reportedly is coming out of the CIA world. [John] Ratcliffe apparently said, ‘OK, you can go with some of this evidence.’ That gives me pause,” said Mauro, a lawyer and former commanding officer of the NYPD’s legal bureau.
“I think we should keep our powder try to see what this goes.”
The raid of Bolton’s home and office occurred the same day the Justice Department handed over some documents about dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the House Oversight Committee.
Also on Friday, a transcript of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s interview with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell reveals that Maxwell did not implicate Trump, formerly a good friend of Epstein’s, in anything nefarious.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking—a pardonable offense. After her interview with Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security prison in Texas which Security Journal Americas named among the “Best Jails in America to Serve Time.”
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