Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
FBI Raids Home of Ambassador Bolton
John Bolton has been a major source of hawkish, and somewhat silly, advice when it comes to American foreign policy for more than a quarter of a century. He has served in the administrations of Messers. Reagan, Bush the Elder, Bush the Lesser and Trump. In the last instance, he was National Security Advisor. About an hour ago, the FBI rolled up to his home in Bethesda, Maryland, with a search warrant. Little in the way of detail has come out, but it is tied to some sort of classified information issue. It appears Mr. Bolton is being punished for being a former supporter turned critic. There is no greater crime in Trumpland.
To get a court order, the FBI and other authorities would have to go to a federal judge in the district where Mr. Bolton lives, and provide probable cause for the search. That means there has to be some valid reason for believing there is evidence of a crime on the property. It is a low bar to clear, but one expects that Mr. Bolton has some classified material in his possession, almost certainly by accident. Regardless of what one thinks of him (and this journal thinks very litte of him), it is hard to believe he would sell or otherwise hand over such information to a foreign power or non-state adversary of the US.
NBC News reported how the adminstration is trying to make this look like it is apolitical.
In a post on X early Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote, "NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission."
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino also appeared to refer to the raid in posts on X.
"America's safety isn't negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always," Bondi wrote early Friday.
"Public corruption will not be tolerated," Bongino wrote.
Given that the man they work for is a man with 34 felony convictions, one cannot take them seriously. This is political, despite the probable cause evidence. Prosecutorial discretion cuts both ways. The prosecutor can ignore cases where conviction is not certain or where there is an overriding social good (e.g., giving an informer immunity to take down the godfather of the crime family). At the same time, a prosecutor can decide to make a mountain out of a molehill, and pursue cases that are not all that important but that have a political angle to them. That is what is going on here.
American has become an authoritarian state, and that means that the rules and norms that applied before are optional now. Often in government, people take shortcuts; they violate protocols because they are inconvenient or more. That is enough of a predicate to engage prosecutors, but usually, the administration ignores minor crimes when a greater goal is in sight.
What seems to be going on here is the purge of Mr. Bolton from the Republican Party and the conservative movement. He has to be punished because he has been saying for a long time that the President is an idiot who needs to be checked at every turn. In the view of MAGA, he is worse than Governor Gavin Newsome of California because Mr. Bolton used to be on the side of the MAGAts. They see his criticisms as betrayals of the cause, and traitors get special punishment.
More of this kind of raid will occur in the future with other targets. Deterrence is important to the budding tyrant; Mr. Bolton has to be investigated pour encourager les autres. If Mr. Bolton were given a pass, it would embolden (a stupid verb but jargon in US politics) others to betray the Fearful Leader.
It is a purge of the party and the movement. The people targetted by the White House will be those who could still drag the American right back in a Reaganesque direction. And there will be some who are not in that position but who will receive the same fate because they lost an internal political fight.
As bad as politics can be in a democracy, they are positively disgusting under a tyrant. More disgust lies ahead.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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