Early Friday morning, FBI agents searched the home of John Bolton, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump who previously served as his national security adviser. The early-morning knock on Bolton’s door should be a wake-up call to every American. This escalation in the Trump administration’s use of law enforcement to target political opposition marks a dangerous new front for American authoritarianism.
The multiyear feud between the president and his former adviser is no secret. Bolton left the first Trump administration after 17 months. Trump claims he fired him, while Bolton said he offered to resign. Since then, Bolton has harshly criticized Trump, alleging that he placed personal political interests over national security.
Trump’s subordinates have leveled similar accusations against his former adviser before.
Search warrants require judicial approval, but because they often remain sealed for months, the allegations and evidence supporting Bolton’s warrant are opaque. Initial reports described the search as part of an investigation into whether Bolton leaked sensitive national security information to the news in order to damage Trump. Subsequent reporting added that the search was based on intelligence collected abroad by the CIA — now headed by sharp Trump partisans.
One of the authors dealt daily with such intel as a diplomat and knows how unreliable and easily manipulated it can be. Skepticism is also in order because Trump’s subordinates have leveled similar accusations against his former adviser before. In June 2020, Bolton was preparing to publish his memoir about working for Trump. The Justice Department sued to block the book’s publication and seize its profits, claiming that Bolton had breached a nondisclosure agreement by including national security information. The suit failed because the book had already been distributed, but at the time, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth questioned whether Bolton had “gambled with” national security and exposed himself to civil and potentially criminal liability.
In September 2020, after the book was published, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation and convened a grand jury. However, the classification expert who oversaw the book’s prepublication review for the National Security Council later documented in a letter filed in court that the book was cleared of classified material. In the letter, the official’s attorneys described how the “apolitical process had been commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose.” The letter suggested a bad-faith campaign against Bolton, and The New York Times reported that the official’s “account implied that the Justice Department may have told a court that the book contains classified information — and opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Bolton — based on false pretenses.” The Biden administration closed the investigation the following year.
Since then, the relationship between Trump and Bolton has soured even further. Bolton was highly critical of Trump leading up to the 2024 election, predicting that a second administration would bring a “constitutional crisis.” In recent weeks, Bolton has strongly condemned Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine, saying that the Russian dictator had “already won” even before the Alaska summit began.
Trump, for his part, has described his former adviser as a “lowlife who should be in jail” and “one of the dumbest people in government.” On Friday, despite denying advance knowledge of the search, the president again called Bolton a “lowlife.”
Trump’s DOJ has already shown a willingness to weaponize the justice system in unprecedented and dangerous ways.
In the coming days, more information about the investigation will inevitably emerge. And just as inevitably, Trump’s critics will denounce the search and his supporters will cheer it, conveniently ignoring their criticism of the Justice Department’s 2022 execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that led to Trump being indicted for mishandling classified documents. Many Americans will shrug off this incident as more partisan warfare in an increasingly hostile arena.
That would be a mistake. As President Harry Truman rightly declared 75 years ago, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
Trump’s DOJ has already shown a willingness to weaponize the justice system in unprecedented and dangerous ways: His administration is engaged in retaliatory investigations of those who investigated him, like New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff. It has launched a series of widely derided prosecutions, including of Judge Hannah Dugan, Rep. LaMonica McIver, labor leader David Huerta and wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ has also filed a baseless ethics complaint against a judge who ruled against the administration; sued all the federal judges in Maryland; and opened a grand jury focused on Obama administration officials who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Bolton search, however, crosses yet another red line. Having FBI agents bang on your door early in the morning, enter your home and seize your property is terrifying. It is an obvious act of intimidation, and another example of this administration putting the president and his allies above the law while weaponizing the law against his perceived enemies.
The same legal apparatus can be wielded against anyone: judges who conclude his policies are unconstitutional; journalists who expose political corruption; members of Congress who vote against his legislation; even ordinary citizens who may have written a letter or a post on social media that he objects to.
We have seen these tactics throughout history: from the Stasi police in East Germany and the DINA in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and many other darker examples to current regimes in Russia, China and Iran. In many of those countries, there was a time when people never thought they would be subject to that kind of oppression, or the deterioration that followed. They believed it could never happen there. We know what happened next. And we must all be clear-eyed about the danger confronting us, whether you currently disagree with the president or not. After all, there was a time when John Bolton would not have dreamed that FBI agents would be entering his home one August morning. Friday’s search was a message not just to Bolton, but to all of Trump’s adversaries and indeed to every American paying attention.