The Wall Street Journal editorial board published an explosive takedown of the Trump administration’s decision to raid both the Bethesda, Maryland home and the Washington, D.C., office of former national security advisor John Bolton Friday. FBI agents spent hours at both locations to uncover if Bolton illegally held or shared classified information.
The outlet described the pursuit as “a revenge campaign” of the sort that Trump explicitly promised voters he would not engage in if reelected, a fact the board immediately noted in its opening paragraph: “President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents,” they wrote.
It continued: “But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.”
Bolton has been a vocal critic of Trump since his departure from the administration in September 2019.
“It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive. Mr. Bolton fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor in the first term and then wrote a book about his experience in the White House while Mr. Trump was still President,” the WSJ also wrote.
Trump unsuccessfully attempted to block the publication of Bolton’s 2020 book, “The Room Where It Happened,” about his experience in the White House. The Biden administration did not opt into the investigation left by Trump’s first administration, but under his second term it appears FBI Director Kash Patel has been inspired to reopen the case.
“Whether Mr. Trump ordered the FBI probe or not doesn’t matter. Mr. Patel knows what the President thinks about Mr. Bolton, and the President’s minions in Trump II don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term. The presidential id is now unchained,” the WSJ insisted.
“This is the kind of gratuitous viciousness that has increasingly defined Mr. Trump’s return to office,” the outlet later added. “The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”
In July Trump sued the Journal for $10 billion, one day after the outlet published a letter the president wrote to former friend and associate Jeffrey Epstein for the latter’s birthday. “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper, the WSJ,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier in the day. “That will be an interesting experience!!!”
The Journal reported Trump’s letter included “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” Trump denied having written the note or drawing the woman.
