The Week That Will Be: John Bolton, Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

The Internet is afire with all the snarky comments that former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton three years ago offered on leftwing TV, following the August 8, 2022, FBI raid on Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago:

1) He insisted that all of Trump’s claims about declassifying documents were a “complete fiction” and a “lie.” (Let us see whether Bolton’s current denials apply to his own use of classified documents outside of secure locations.) One wonders how Bolton would know that Trump’s claims of declassifying documents were “complete” lies.

2) “There is no evidence there is a partisan motive here…I think everybody just ought to calm down, whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and let the process work its way through.” (Let us see whether Bolton urges the same warnings about not jumping the gun until the facts emerge in his own case—and whether he still believes the 2022 raid to grab 102 disputed classified documents of some 13,000 at the Trump residence was “partisan,” such as scattering documents on the floor, photographing them, and releasing the photos to the public to suggest, wrongly, a supposedly sloppy manner in which they were stored.)

3) “No one is above the law” (Let us see whether Bolton’s warning applies to…Bolton).

4) “He liked cool things, he saw things, so he wanted to take them … Some days he liked to eat a lot of French fries, some days he took classified documents.” (Let us see whether Bolton wanted cool things like classified information to lend credence and gravitas to his book, or public persona, or professional life).

The basic facts of the Bolton raid run as follows. He was reportedly a nonstop note-taker at high-level presidential meetings here and abroad. (Doesn’t anyone discourage high officials from being seen publicly taking notes; and are not such notes subject to security checks upon leaving office?)

After being fired in September 2019, Bolton became a fierce Never Trumper and considered a presidential run in 2020. And thus, he soon hit the MSNBC/CNN circuit, in the manner of John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey. Soon Bolton was the go-to Republican critic of Trump in the 2020 election years and was valued by the Left for intimate and always incriminating “inside” knowledge of the Trump White House.

Meanwhile, Bolton had been turning his working White House notes into a tell-all book with the revealing (or incriminating) title, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. Was the title designed to suggest that Bolton’s book would give an inside (negative) look at the Oval Office where highly classified conversations took place? And was not the title self-incriminating in itself?

Why was the book deliberately timed to appear during the Biden–Trump 2020 campaign? Was Bolton’s intention to jack up sales and thereby supposedly reveal to voters the real dangers of a second Trump term? In fact, The Room Where It Happened appeared in late June 2020 and did, as intended, likely hurt the Trump candidacy.

The Trump DOJ claimed the book was not properly vetted and had illegally used classified information. And while U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth refused to stop the issuance of the book, he did severely criticize Bolton for deliberately using information that might have endangered U.S. security. Indeed, he warned him that further investigation might translate either into forfeiture of the book’s profits or criminal consequences: “Defendant Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States. He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability.”

The departing Trump DOJ turned over its active investigation to Biden AG Merrick Garland. About five months later, Garland closed down the investigation without comment. Bolton for the next four years was a go-to person for inside dirt on Trump and was often called to comment on the lawfare Trump wilderness years of 2021–25.

Finally, however, his inside commentary grew stale and out-of-date, despite occasional anti-Trump appearances during the 2024 campaign.