Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former “fixer” and lawyer, gave John Bolton some advice after Trump’s Department of Justice raided his home Friday: “Lawyer up.”
“I’ve been there,” Cohen, who served three years in prison for lying to Congress, tax evasion and committing campaign finance fraud that involved hush-money payments to women who said they had affairs with Trump, shared during his Friday appearance on “MSNBC Reports.”
“As you know, years back they raided my home, hotel and my law office as well. Let me be very clear about something: what we have here is the Trump team, the DOJ, going through, for example, the book, ‘The Room Where It Happened,’ which I actually had read while I was in solitary confinement,” Cohen said, referring to Bolton’s 2020 book “The Room Where It Happened,” which is a first-hand account of Bolton’s 17 months serving in Trump during his first term.
“[Trump’s camp] noticed that there are many aspects of this book that appear to be of national security importance, and that’s what I believe, that they predicated this raid upon,” Cohen went on, seemingly explaining that he believes Trump’s team already planned out their investigation into Bolton based on the contents and publication of his book, which he may not have secured proper clearance for to write.
“I also believe that there’s no doubt that he will be indicted,” Cohen said. “They will find documents once they go through, for example, his computer, they’ll find the manuscript. They’ll see emails going back and forth between John Bolton and his people, as well as maybe the attorney that reviewed it for legal ease and for questions. He needs to lawyer up. Very much like what happened two years ago.”
On Friday, FBI agents raided Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland home as well as his Washington, D.C. office. While he has not been arrested or charged, reports state the raid was enforced as part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”
Later on that day, Vice President JD Vance rejected the idea that the raid is the administration’s way of getting payback against Bolton for his criticisms of the president.
“No, not at all,” Vance told NBC’s Kristen Welker during his “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” interview. “In fact, if we were trying to do that we would just throw out prosecutions willy nilly like the Biden administration’s DOJ did. Prosecutions that later got thrown out in court. If we bring a case, of course we haven’t done that yet, the Department of Justice has not done that yet, we’re investigating Ambassador Bolton. But if they ultimately bring a case, it will be because they determined that he has broken the law.”
You can watch Cohen’s interview in the video above.
