FBI Raids Home of Trump Critic John Bolton

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The FBI raided the home of John Bolton, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump who previously served as his national security adviser, on Friday morning.

According to The New York Post, agents arrived at Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, at approximately 7:00 a.m. to search it as part of what the Post called a “national security probe” pertaining to classified documents.

Bolton was reportedly at home when agents arrived there, and is not under arrest.

A senior U.S. official told the paper that the probe into Bolton began “years ago,” and claimed that it was shut down “for political reasons.”

At 7:03 a.m. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.”

The Post reported that the raid was carried out as part of an investigation “ordered” by Patel himself.

Bolton has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics in the years since Bolton left his first administration under tense circumstances. While Trump asserted in a September 2019 tweet that he had informed Bolton that his “services” were “no longer needed,” prompting the longtime GOP foreign policy hand to offer his resignation, Bolton asserted that he had initiated his own exit and Trump didn’t ask for his resignation “directly or indirectly.”

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has not minced words in his evaluation of his old boss. Earlier this year, he submitted that Trump’s “mind is full of mush and he says whatever comes into it.”

“Donald Trump’s chaotic national-security governance is in full flood. Whether it’s risking American military operations, making volatile, highly dubious tariff decisions, hiring uninformed senior advisers, or seeing senior government officials dissenting from presidential decisions, the disarray is palpable and likely to spread,” argued Bolton in a column for The Wall Street Journal. “Chaos is embedded in his DNA and endemic in his team.”

For his part, Trump name-checked Bolton on Truth Social as recently as Sunday night, when he declared that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine “can be ended, NOW, but stupid people like Chris Murphy, John Bolton, and others, make it much harder to do so.”