“John Bolton Surrenders To Federal Authorities” is a headline I could have only dreamed of seeing 20 years ago, but this morning it came true. Following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment of Bolton, the former Trump National Security Advisor and W. Bush Iraq War architect/manipulator gave himself up and pled not guilty in federal court on charges of mishandling classified information. But if Bolton isn’t guilty, I’m a high-stakes poker professional.
The charges claimed that Bolton was “unlawfully hoarding” documents, that he sent classified information over grandpa communication medium AOL instant Messenger in 2018 and that he shared more than 1,000 pages of notes, while working on a memoir, with his wife and daughter, neither of whom had security clearances. “From on or about April 9, 2018, through on or about September 15, 2019, on a regular basis, Bolton sent diary-like entries to [his wife and daughter] that contained information classified up to the Top Secret/SCI level,” says the indictment.
Now, let’s be clear, even though we can dream, this isn’t Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Aldrich Ames-like stuff. Bolton was just trying to enjoy a final cashing-in on a lifelong career of neoconservative warmongering. But Iranian hackers, representatives of a government that wouldn’t mind targeting Trump, not to mention Bolton, also have access to AOL. According to the indictment, they intercepted the messages. Looks like the man with the walrus mustache got a little careless with his “secret travel memos.”
Bolton said, in a statement, “These charges are not just about [Trump’s] focus on me or my diaries, but his intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct,” Bolton said. “Dissent and disagreement are foundational to America’s constitutional system, and vitally important to our freedom. I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power.”
It’s true that Bolton has had some unkind things to say about Trump since leaving his political orbit, and it’s also true that Trump is using any means necessary to target his political enemies, real or perceived. But unlike James Comey and Letitia James, Trump’s other two most powerful recent lawfare targets, Bolton’s indictment actually has a chance to stick. He almost certainly won’t serve a full 10-year sentence, but the grand jury indictment is quite specific and pointed. The law tends to be biased against a guy who’s “hoarding strategic government communications” for his memoir.
Let’s keep in mind that Bolton was a key architect of one of the biggest government deceptions of our time, or any time, the absolute insistence of the George W. Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which led to one of the most pointless wars in American history. Talking to NPR in 2023, a sure sign that the political winds had shifted, Bolton said, “it depends on how you define a lie, because if you believe that’s a lie, then a lot of what I hear on NPR on any given day is a lie. To me, a lie is a statement that’s untrue, that’s uttered deliberately knowing it’s false. The administration didn’t lie.”
Sure, John. In my mind, Bolton’s indictment is about yellowcake uranium, not about saying mean things about Donald Trump in a memoir called The Room Where It Happened. But you can only go to war with the army you have. John Bolton as the ultimate defender of free speech, dissent and disagreement feels like a bit much to me. Next thing you know, Democrats will be trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the Cheney family. Truth be told, it’s kind of hard to believe.
Tag: John Bolton
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John Bolton’s AOL chat with Iran
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Retribution looms for the NeverTrumpers
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” says James Comey, the former FBI director, in a video statement on – naturally – Bluesky. “We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”
The Resistance is strong in that one. To a dwindling number of hardcore NeverTrumpers, Comey is a sort of godfather figure. He seems to love the attention, too. He wrote a self-aggrandizing memoir called A Higher Loyalty, about his fall-out with Donald Trump and the start of the Trump-Russia, Russia, Russia business. Earlier this year, moreover, he was even accused of elliptically threatening Trump’s life, when he posted and then deleted on Instagram an image showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells on a beach. (The number 86 is code for “get rid of,” or “kill” in gangster-speak, and Donald Trump is currently serving as the 47th President of the United States.)
Now it’s Team Trump that’s threatening Comey – with imprisonment. Yesterday, Trump’s DoJ indicted him on two counts: for making a false statement and for obstructing a congressional proceeding. Reports of the indictment are full of sources suggesting it is wafer-weak, in terms of legal power. Yet the Trump administration seems to be relishing its opportunity to use the legal system to exact revenge on the legal system and the various “resistance” heroes such as Comey who spent years trying to condemn Donald Trump on any number of fronts.
Kash Patel, the new FBI director, insists his Bureau is merely calling “balls and strikes,” focusing on the mission rather than revenge. But nobody believes that. This is what the “retribution” Trump promised looks like. This is what many Trump supporters voted for.
Other NeverTrumpers will be next. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, who also wrote a pompous memoir about the awfulness of the Donald, is next in the DoJ’s sights. The FBI searched his downtown office in DC last month and reportedly seized various classified documents.
On another front, too, Attorney General Pam Bondi is pursuing the George Soros Foundation, for allegedly supporting terrorism, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Critics will continue to moan about the erosion of civilized politics and a slide toward authoritarianism. This can’t be happening in America! Over and again, however, the Trump administration’s response is: “Let’s see about that.” Or, to borrow from the vulgar pro-Trump meme, “WAGTFKY” (“We Are Going To Fucking Kill You.”)
Trumpists in Washington hope that the American public will spot the way in which the Democratic media machine, which cheered on every act of lawfare against Donald Trump, now pours scorn on Bondi, Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, for pursuing Trump’s enemies. Trump insiders also think that figures such as Comey, Bolton and others are so contemptibly self-important that people can’t help but oppose them.
And there’s no doubt that the double-standards and sanctimonious hypocrisy of NeverTrumpers are deeply galling to the President’s supporters.
It’s notable, however, that, as his administration’s lawfare operation has ramped up in recent weeks, Trump’s approval rating has dipped. That might have more to do with broader concerns about the economy. But most American voters don’t seem to like the weaponization of justice, no matter who is doing it.
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Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare
A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.”
The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.
Donald Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history
We are supposed to deplore lawfare as a perversion or misapplication of the law. Which it is. But the temperature and asperity of public disapproval varies widely depending on who is directing the process. In part, it is a matter of political coloration. If you are on the side conducting the lawfare, you are likely to describe the process as a “no-one-is-above-the-law” form of accountability. If you are on the receiving end, you are likely to point out the partisan and selective nature of the assault. Given the political biases of our establishment culture, lawfare directed at Donald Trump and his allies earns an automatic quota of indulgence. It is excused, or half excused, as at least an attempt to pursue justice, to find “truth.”
Lawfare prosecuted by Trump and his allies, however, finds itself instantly saddled with morally charged obloquy. Two wrongs, you will have often heard, do not make a right. It was unseemly of Joe Biden & Co. to go after Trump and those in his orbit – but Trump’s response, we are told, is simply appalling. The swishing sound you hear in the background is the word “retribution” being dusted off and prepped for prime time.
Kimberley Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, provided one version of this line of argument. Trump “insisted that his ‘retribution’ would be through winning office and making ‘our country successful.’ Conservatives in particular were eager to see the President remove the Justice Department from the political sphere. That hope is out the window seven months in.”
I wonder whether the history of actual warfare might be more illuminating. When the Germans decided to start World War One, their plan of attack, formulated by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, called for them to mount a lightning assault against France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The plan called for the Germans to destroy the French army and occupy Paris within 40 days.
Then came the first battle of the Marne early in September 1914. “The Miracle on the Marne” halted the German advance. It also condemned Europe to four years of attritional warfare that left millions dead and large swaths of France in ruins.
The Democrats had their own Schlieffen plan to be used against Trump after 2020. They would conduct what amounted to a Blitzkrieg of total lawfare against him. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, commanded one division. Alvin Bragg, District Attorney in New York City, commanded a second. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who went after Trump in Florida and in Washington, DC, commanded two others.
If the process is the punishment in legal proceedings, as we are often reminded, Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history. But it is worth remembering that the aim of the lawfare was not simply to punish Trump but to destroy him. It was a multi-front assault. Bankruptcy loomed on one front, jail on another. Then came at least two assassination attempts, not officially part of the lawfare, but spiritually adjacent.
The Kaiser miscalculated when he went to war in Europe. I think that the battalions of anti-Trump activists, in the media and our political establishment as well as in the law, miscalculated when they took up arms against Trump. His response has not been to dig trenches and hunker down. What he has done resembles the D-Day invasion of Normandy more than the pointless slaughter of the Somme or Verdun.
Anti-Trump commentators are up in arms because the President has stormed the beaches of the Deep State and overrun many of its defensive positions. They skirl hysterically when he fires a governor of the Federal Reserve (“But she’s the first black woman to hold the position!”). Trump removes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris. “A petty, vindictive move from a small man,” quoth a group called “Republicans Against Trump.” But then it turns out that Harris enjoyed the posse longer than any former vice-president in history.
Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton wakes up to find his home and office raided by the FBI. “Retribution” screams the anti-Trump press. But then it turns out the FBI had been investigating Bolton at least since the Biden administration, which eventually shut down the inquiry – possibly, just possibly, because Bolton was such a vocal anti-Trump critic. Two separate magistrates, one in DC, one in Maryland, approved the FBI search warrants. Why? Because, as the New York Times grudgingly acknowledged, data gathered from the spy service of an “adversarial country” included “sensitive,” i.e., classified, information that Bolton, “while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.”
The list goes on. The Dems perfected lawfare and unleashed it against Trump under the twin assumptions that it would succeed and that the Republicans would never retaliate in kind. Trump has upended both assumptions. Which is why I believe that what Trump is doing is not a matter of “retribution” or lawfare. It is a battle of liberation from the tyranny of lawfare.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
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The Feds move in on Bolton
“NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” FBI director Kash Patel posted on X at 7 a.m. ET. He provided a solution to that cryptogram soon after, as agents raided the Bethesda home of permanently grouchy former Trump national security advisor John Bolton. Over his pre-raid morning coffee, Bolton was criticizing Trump’s Russia-Ukraine negotiations, calling them basically useless: “Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but I don’t see these talks making any progress,” he wrote. Soon after, the cars pulled up. Whoops!
A source told Daily Caller editor Vince Coglianese, “This is related to a national security investigation of Mr. Bolton that was shut down by the Biden administration for political reasons. It involves stealing classified documents and weaponizing them for political purposes. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have reopened the investigation. Hence this morning’s raid.”
John Bolton has the right to either remain silent or tweet whatever he wants, but though he remains a free man, charges may loom. Cockburn is no fan of the Walrus’s war machinations, and is interested to see how this particular saga unfolds. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino tweeted this morning, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”
Meanwhile Roger Stone, no stranger to house raids, said on X: “Good morning. John Bolton. How does it feel to have your home raided at 6 o’clock in the morning?”
Visiting the People’s House gift shop this morning while wearing a red MAGA cap emblazoned with the slogan “Trump was right about everything,” President Trump had this to say about the Bolton warrant: “Don’t know about it. Saw it on television this morning. Not a fan, he’s sort of a lowlife. He’s a very quiet person, except on television if he can say something bad about Trump. Not a smart guy, could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”
Cockburn hears there are a few beds open at Alligator Alcatraz.
On our radar
HAVING A BALL The President took reporters – including The Spectator’s Matt McDonald – to look at architectural improvement being made by the administration. They have stopped at the People’s House, which has a new gift shop, and are outside the Kennedy Center, where the 2026 FIFA World Cup draw will be held.
CAPITAL CRACKDOWN Seventy-six arrests were made last night as part of the White House’s temporary federalization of DC law enforcement. That brings the total to 719 made since Trump activated the emergency clause of the 1973 Home Rule Act. Of the 719, 36 were illegal aliens.
PAT ON THE BACK Representative Riley Moore has urged President Trump to confer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, onto Pat Buchanan. The journalist, Nixon aide and three-time populist candidate for the White House is widely seen as something of a John the Baptist for MAGA, emphasizing the same core agenda of immigration controls and a rebalancing of the terms of trade. Such a gong for Buchanan would formalize the inheritance.
Counterrevolution in Minnesota?
Is the Democratic establishment – whose obituary has been read many times over the past decade – now twitching back to life? Possibly – in Minnesota at least. The Democratic Farmer Labour party (the Democrats’ local chapter) has taken the remarkable step of revoking its earlier endorsement of Omar Fateh, the Zohran Mamdani-like candidate for mayor of Minneapolis.
Their reason? The Minneapolis DFL’s Convention last month, where Mr. Fateh received his endorsement, was widely seen as a fiasco with numerous allegations of rule-breaking and irregularity. The DFL received no less than 98 formal challenges to the result from participants. According to delegate Will Stancil, there were a number of dubious last-minute rule changes that favored Fateh, a malfunctioning electronic voting system, and general procedural skulduggery. Stancil made no less than four attempts to vote before his choice was recorded. As a result, the DFL’s endorsement has now been “vacated” – throwing an unexpected lifeline to the incumbent Jacob Frey, the more centrist candidate, though someone who presided over some of the worst rioting of summer 2020.
The forward march of the Democratic far-left seems to have been checked in Minnesota. Cockburn, for his part, welcomes this sudden and by no means cynical conversion to the cause of election integrity.
RFK Jr.’s good jeans
It’s the viral fitness challenge that’s taking the MAGAsphere by storm: cabinet secretaries Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are laying down the gauntlet of the “Pete & Bobby Challenge” to their peers. The ask: 100 push-ups, 50 pull-ups, 10 minutes – ostensibly as part of an effort to Make America Healthy Again. In the snazzy viral video promoting the effort, shot at the Pentagon Gym with hyper-fit members of the military, the septuagenarian Secretary Kennedy busts out the challenge in close to five minutes, sporting a pair of blue jeans.
RFK Jr.’s commitment to denim knows no limits. An athletic-minded tipster was sweltering away in the Georgetown Gold’s Gym on Wednesday morning, as the air conditioning was broken. Sat opposite him, without a bead of sweat on him: RFK Jr. In jeans.