(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board warned allies of President Donald Trump on Friday to take careful note of the “lesson” that former national security adviser John Bolton’s indictment means for them: “You are not safe.”
In a scathing column, the Journal accused prosecutors of fulfilling Trump’s long-stated “call to punish his former national security adviser and frequent critic,” framing the case as part of a broader pattern of political retribution under the president’s second term that has seen cases brought against former FBI director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James.
Bolton was charged late Thursday with multiple counts of mishandling classified information. The former U.N. ambassador insists his notes were lawful personal recollections used to write his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which had already cleared government review.
“The press will add Mr. Bolton to the President’s revenge prosecution list,” the Journal wrote.
But the board’s warning was broader, less about Bolton himself than the message his case sends to Trump’s allies and how
“The lesson is that if you work for the President, he then sours on you and you criticize him, you are not safe,” the article reads.
Trump has publicly called for Bolton’s prosecution since the book’s publication, once writing: “He released massive amounts of classified, and confidential, but classified information. That’s illegal and you go to jail for that.”
The board drew a pointed comparison between Bolton’s case and Trump’s own dismissed classified-documents indictment, nodding back to its previous warning that pursuing Trump in that case was “a bad road for Democrats to go down.”