Smoke and fire.
Just because the Bolton investigation looks corrupt doesn’t mean it is corrupt. Trump supporters leapt to that conclusion about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and emulating Trump supporters is almost always a bad idea.
There is some smoke here. Details are scarce at this point, but I assume the search has to do with the controversy over Bolton’s 2020 book, The Room Where It Happened, where he revealed some of the things he saw and heard while working in the first Trump White House. Before it was published, a national security official named Michael Ellis vetted Bolton’s manuscript for classified information and claimed to have found at least six examples. Because of that, the administration never signed off on it—but Bolton told his publisher to go ahead and release the book anyway.
When the White House sued to try to block it, federal judge Royce Lamberth declined to intervene but conceded that Team Trump seemed to have a point. He was “persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations,” he said in his ruling. Trump’s DOJ responded by opening a criminal investigation into Bolton. Joe Biden’s DOJ ended that investigation the following year.
So, at first blush, things look dicey for the former NSA. There’s an easy story one can tell about him being reckless and greedy five years ago in pushing his book out in order to capitalize on interest in the election, before the sensitive information in it had been diligently redacted. Presumably, the new Trump DOJ has revived the old Trump DOJ’s criminal probe into the matter and is searching Bolton’s property now for proof of wrongdoing, right under the wire before the five-year statute of limitations runs out.
And it must have gotten a warrant to do so, which means a federal judge was presented with evidence of a crime and found probable cause to believe that one had occurred. MAGA zombies consistently overlooked that detail when the feds descended on Trump’s home in 2022, but we shouldn’t in Bolton’s case. It’s a big deal.
So there’s smoke, and if there’s also fire, then the DOJ has every right to prosecute even if they’re prosecuting for quietly political reasons. But is there fire?
As it turns out, the “easy story” about Bolton mishandling classified information is too easy.
To begin with, Ellis wasn’t the first natsec official to vet Bolton’s manuscript for classified material in 2020. Ellen Knight, an expert in government classification, was. She worked with Bolton to excise sensitive information and assured him “informally” in April of that year that all of the problematic details had been removed. But instead of the White House formally approving it for release, they handed it to Ellis and told him to check her work. Ellis was a political appointee who had previously worked for Trump toady Devin Nunes and, unlike Knight, wasn’t trained in prepublication review.
Wouldn’t you know it, he delivered the verdict that the president was hoping for: The book, which risked damaging Trump before the election, could not safely go forward. Knight claims that White House deputies were so keen to suppress her own approval of the manuscript that they warned her not to communicate with them about it via writing and called her in for a meeting on a Saturday to pressure her by challenging her reasoning about the book.
As for Judge Lamberth, Knight’s lawyer claimed there’s a good reason that he ended up siding with Trump’s view of the book. He didn’t get to consider Knight’s analysis, only Ellis’ and that of four presidentially-appointed national security officials.
All of which means that there’s also an easy story to tell here on John Bolton’s behalf. True to form, Donald Trump abused executive power by using false pretenses to try to quash information that might hurt him at the polls. He contrived a “national security” excuse to spike the book and scrounged up a few yes-men whom he knew would supply the requisite justification. Bolton saw through it and refused to let his work languish in bad-faith limbo, so he moved forward with publishing. The Biden DOJ saw through it too, declining to prosecute him in light of the “highly political manner” in which Trump’s team had acted.
So why is the new administration coming after him again now? Why not just let the statute of limitations run?
‘A retribution presidency.’
We can answer that question with a question. If Americans come to suspect that John Bolton is indeed being prosecuted over a political vendetta, not due to genuine criminal wrongdoing, is that good or bad for Donald Trump?
Traditionally, a president could only be hurt by suspicions that he’s “weaponizing” law enforcement. Ask Joe Biden, whose Justice Department agonized over prosecuting the current president because of how it would look to the public.
Attorney General Merrick Garland wrung his hands anxiously for more than a year before reluctantly charging the leader of the Republican Party for trying to make himself a dictator in 2020. The documents saga at Mar-a-Lago was even more tortured: The National Archives and DOJ spent a year and a half begging Trump to voluntarily return the reams of classified material he’d taken and spare them from the terrible optics of having to retrieve all of it forcibly. The FBI was called in only after it became clear that the former president was deliberately concealing state secrets and would never give them back.
No matter how pure your intentions and how warranted the charges, when you sic federal cops and prosecutors on a known political nemesis, you’re inviting Americans to conclude that law enforcement is doing the White House’s dirty work. No president wants the public to look at him like he’s a mob boss, dispatching goons to menace his enemies when they get in his way.
Except Trump. That’s exactly what he wants.
He governs according to the authoritarian maxim, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” And John Bolton is the perfect enemy for him to make an example of.
To begin with, Bolton has been an outspoken critic of the president’s for years, so much so that he resorted to needling Trump on Twitter this morning for being too credulous about Russia’s intentions while the FBI was searching his home. He also despises Patel and makes no secret of it. Last December, when the Senate took up his nomination to lead the FBI, Bolton disparaged him on television and in print. Everyone knows that he’s on Trump’s bad side.
It’s also important, I think, that Bolton is a former Trump ally and adviser, not a partisan opponent. That makes his “disloyalty” since 2020 more personal and glaring, and leaves neither party with a strong incentive to defend him. The fact that the criminal case being built against him has to do with mishandling classified information probably also appeals to the president and his aides: Trump has always defended his corruption with “everyone does it” excuses, and having Bolton on the hot seat for national security offenses adds a bit more credence to his defenses about his own document-hoarding at Mar-a-Lago.
Taking revenge on Bolton was so high a priority for Trump that he found time on his third day back in office to rescind his former adviser’s federal security detail despite the fact that he’s been targeted for assassination by Iran. And so it seemed inevitable that he would try at some point to revive the cloud of criminal suspicion over Bolton that he first cast in 2020. Whether the charges stick isn’t the point, any more than getting treason charges to stick against “Barack Hussein Obama” is the point in the latest iteration of the Russiagate saga. The point is to further raise the price of making an enemy of Donald Trump by impugning, harassing, and discrediting those who dare.
This is why I say that it’s good for the president if the public comes away from this saga assuming that Bolton is being prosecuted due to a political vendetta. In so many ways, from staffing up with fanatic loyalists to shaking down corporations and universities to empowering masked goons to grab people off the street, his administration has been designed to convince Americans that the most dangerous thing they can do is cross him. “A retribution presidency,” Bolton himself dubbed it in an interview just 12 days ago. Trump governs by fear and is keen to advertise it, and nothing is scarier than the possibility that instruments of state violence like law enforcement might take an interest in you for no better reason than that you’ve pissed him off.
As the facts come out and we descend into a morass of turgid legal discourse over whether John Bolton technically committed a crime or not, the question to keep in mind is this: Is there the faintest chance that his home would have been searched had he spent the last year singing Donald Trump’s praises? If the answer is no—and fearful Americans are being invited to assume that it is—then law has virtually nothing to do with this.
Taunts.
All of which makes me think that the tweets from Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino this morning aren’t actually examples of willful blindness.
When they say “justice will be pursued,” “no one is above the law,” and “public corruption will not be tolerated,” they’re not overlooking how the president’s actions contradict their words. They’re applying postliberal logic: The law is for you, their enemies, not for their friends. There’s no inconsistency in holding people like John Bolton to one standard and holding Donald Trump to no standard. That’s how postliberalism works, by design.
Their tweets aren’t oblivious or hypocritical. They’re taunts.
As Jonathan Last pointed out, the same “reasoning” explains why the president felt no shame yesterday in calling for the release of Tina Peters, the “rigged election” crank serving hard time in a Colorado prison for tampering with voting equipment in 2020. You might assume someone like Trump, whose paranoia has now led him to oppose voting machines in principle, would want to make an example of someone who messed with election infrastructure. But again, there’s no inconsistency: Like the January 6ers, Peters committed a crime to help Trump, not to hurt him. She’s a friend, not an enemy.
So why is she subject to the law?
Once you understand that this is how postliberals think, there’s no incongruity in Bolton being pursued for national security crimes as news circulates that Kash Patel wants the FBI to spend less time on national security crimes. Bolton’s real offense isn’t endangering Americans by exposing state secrets; it’s endangering Donald Trump’s popularity. Of course the Bureau is still going to pursue the president’s “enemies” for that. What else is it there for?
I hope Liz Cheney, Mark Milley, and Anthony Fauci have good lawyers around them because they’re going to need them, pardons or no pardons. That’s the kind of America that Americans voted for in November, and that’s the kind we’re going to get.
