National Review Sounds the Alarm Over Trump’s ‘Petty and Vindictive’ John Bolton Probe

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

National Review sounded the alarm over the “petty and vindictive” federal investigation of President Donald Trump’s adviser-turned-critic John Bolton in an editorial on Tuesday.

While the conservative magazine acknowledged that not all of the facts are known yet, it flagged Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the administration has “a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.”

“That formulation makes it sounds more like a personalized grievance against a fierce Trump critic rather than a dispassionate probe of a particular violation of the law,” it began before characterizing the probe — which is suspected to be “an effort to relitigate complaints investigated five years ago that drafts of Bolton’s June 2020 memoir allegedly containing classified information (excised before publication) were shared with people not cleared to read them” — as “petty and vindictive.”

“Pro-Trump voices have argued that retributive uses of lawfare are fair game — they did it to Trump, after all. This is a dangerous way to think about the coercive power of government, but it also makes little sense when applied to Bolton. He is a lifelong conservative and a former Trump official long despised by Democrats and the left. While Democrats have found his barbed critiques of Trump useful in recent years, he was obviously not a prosecutor, and not advising Merrick Garland, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, or Letitia James on how to use, or abuse, the powers of their offices,” continued the editorial, which concluded with the argument that “No one is above the law, but neither should the law be used as an instrument of harassment against political critics.”

Other conservatives voices and publications have also condemned the Trump administration over its raid on Bolton’s home and office last week. Fox News’ Andy McCarthy has called it a “very sad development,” while The Wall Street Journal observed that “it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he [Trump] will define success in his second term.”