John Bolton raid is vengeful Trump weaponising justice to crush his foes

But Friday's raid on the Maryland home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, marks another line crossed in the president’s use of law enforcement to target his political enemies.

Bolton, who fell out with Trump during his first term and was fired in 2019 after a string of clashes over his hawkish stance on Iran and North Korea, has remained a trenchant critic of his former boss.

In television appearances over recent weeks he has accused Trump of kowtowing to Vladimir Putin in his attempt to end the war in Ukraine and derided the President’s obsession with winning the Nobel peace prize. Trump responded by calling his former aide “stupid” and claimed that the neoconservative Bolton, who also served under George W Bush, “blew up the Middle East”.

The dawn raid by the FBI marks a dramatic escalation in the pair’s war of words and sends a clear warning to other Trump critics.

The pictures of FBI agents carting away boxes while Bolton’s wife, Gretchen, stood on the doorstep in a dressing gown, underscored the intimidating power of the US government and of Trump’s fixation with revenge on those who wronged or betrayed him, particularly on primetime television.

With agents still searching Bolton’s home and Washington office on Friday morning, Trump professed ignorance of the raid. “I know nothing about it, I just saw it this morning,” the president told reporters, wearing a hat with the slogan: “Trump was right about everything.”

But he could not resist a swipe at his former adviser, condemning Bolton as “a lowlife” and “not a smart guy”.

Going further, however, Trump underlined his view that the justice department is merely a tool of the presidency, effectively serving as his own police force. “I could know about it,” he said of the raid. “I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer.”

This is not true constitutionally, but Bolton knew it was coming. Within hours of taking office in January, Trump stripped his former adviser of secret service protection assigned after credible death threats from Iran. Less than two weeks ago, Bolton told ABC News that he anticipated further reprisals. “I think it is a retribution presidency,” Bolton said of his former boss.

With Trump’s return to power, the justice department has reopened an investigation into claims that Bolton disclosed classified material in his scathing 2020 memoir The Room Where it Happened.

The book portrayed Trump as “stunningly uninformed” about foreign policy and the basic functions of government. Bolton also alleged that Trump sought to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Kyiv launched a corruption probe against Joe Biden. That claim formed the basis of Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump tried unsuccessfully to quash the book at the time, claiming that Bolton had breached a non-disclosure agreement. The investigation was dropped under the Biden administration in 2021.

What new evidence the justice department has sufficient to issue a search warrant of Bolton’s home remains unclear. But the raid itself appeared calculated to send a message. Even if the latest investigation of Bolton has no merit, the 76-year-old will likely spend the next three years in an exhausting and ruinously expensive legal battle.

Ousted from the White House in 2021 while still disputing his election defeat to Biden, Trump railed against the “weaponisation” of the justice department through four criminal indictments and civil judgments of fraud and sexual assault.

With his remarkable comeback victory in November, however, the path is now clear for Trump to take revenge. A copy of his police mugshot on the front page of the New York Post now hangs just outside the Oval Office framed in gold.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the FBI director, Kash Patel – staunch loyalists and Maga celebrities in their own right – are willing soldiers in Trump’s crusade.

A purge of the justice department has seen scores of perceived enemies fired, among them lawyers who worked on criminal prosecutions of Trump, including his own indictment over the hoard of classified documents seized at his Florida club.

A string of Trump’s enemies are now under investigation. They include the California senator Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor on Trump’s first impeachment, and the former FBI director James Comey over the “Russiagate” affair.

The newly appointed “weaponisation czar” Ed Martin, a conservative activist who defended 6 January rioters at the Capitol and has referred to US federal prosecutors as “President Trump’s lawyers,” is pursuing the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who prosecuted Trump for civil fraud.

Bondi and Patel joined the celebrations among Maga loyalists on social media as the raid on Bolton’s home began.

“No one is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,” tweeted Patel, who named Bolton on a supposed “enemies list” in a book last year.

“America’s safety isn’t negotiable,” Bondi added, replying to Patel’s post. “Justice will be pursued. Always.”

The pursuit of Trump’s enemies stokes the Maga base at a time when the White House is eager to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the president’s ties to the late financier and sex offender.

Whether by coincidence or design, the justice department later released a transcript of its interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.

Maxwell, who is lobbying for a pardon, exonerated the president, telling the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, that Trump was “never inappropriate” with Epstein’s victims.

“In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” Maxwell told Blanche, who is Trump’s former attorney Whether that will wash with Maga hardliners still demanding the unredacted Epstein files remains to be seen.

But the Maxwell interview and the Bolton raid underline that in this administration, the ultimate powers of the US’s “chief law enforcement officer” lie with the president alone

Photograph by by Saul Loeb/AFP. Others pictures by Evan Vucci/AP