Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Last week, the FBI—under the aegis of the Department of Justice—raided John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump during his first term. And they raided his home and his house. And they took away documents, which allegedly, the target of the raid were these documents.
Bolton was not arrested. He was not indicted. There was no effort aimed at him personally. But the accusation, apparently, was that he had removed classified documents.
Almost immediately, the Left and the “Never Trump” Right, said, “See, we told you Donald Trump is on a revenge tour. First it was John Brennan, and then James Clapper, then James Comey. He’ll go after Anthony Fauci. Anybody that doesn’t have a pardon is fair game.”
But there’s more to the story than that. In 2019, when Trump fired John Bolton as national security adviser, he was writing a book. And he sold that book on the premise that he had been in the room. The title was, essentially, “This happened in the room” or “What happened in the room.” And he took prodigious notes.
So, he was supposed to be this anti-Trump, high-level appointee and famous in the conservative circles as a war hawk and interventionist. But he had intimate knowledge about how Donald Trump functioned abroad with major allies and enemies and rivals and neutrals and how he was at home. And he wrote this damning book, memoir about Trump.
The Trump DOJ said, “He’s just trying to write this right during the campaign season. And he’s a surrogate for the Biden campaign, in his bitterness. He’s angry. But more importantly, he is using this classified information through the filter of the notes he took and he is going to hurt U.S. national security.”