John Bolton, who served as a national security adviser in President Donald Trump’s first administration, has been one of the most outspoken detractors of the President. On Friday, federal officials searched his home and office.
Following his time in the White House, Bolton penned a damning book ‘The Room Where It Happened’ detailing Trump’s appalling lack of foreign policy knowledge.
What did John Bolton do? All about FBI raids
According to reports, FBI investigators searched Bolton’s Washington office and Maryland home as part of a probe into how secret material was handled. The move raises concerns about potential future measures against Republican administration critics who have expressed their views. However, it has not been cleared what exactly Bolton did.
An individual who was not permitted to speak about the probe by name told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that Bolton was not arrested and has not been charged with any crimes.
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Bolton was appointed as Trump’s national security adviser
In 2018, Bolton was named as Trump’s third national security adviser following the dismissal of H.R. McMaster.
Bolton’s 17-month term was filled with conflicts over nations like Iran and North Korea, and he expressed doubt about Trump’s attempts to reach out to and meet with Kim Jong Un. Bolton was irritated when Trump canceled a planned military strike in 2019 but supported Trump’s move to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. He also supported regime change.
Bolton eventually left due to such differences, with Trump announcing on social media in September 2019 that he had approved Bolton’s resignation.
Bolton’s bombshell book ‘The Room Where It Happened’
Bolton hit the headlines with his 2020 book, “The Room Where It Happened,” which provided the most detailed first-person account of Trump’s behavior in power at the time, painting an unapologetic picture of the president and his administration. Bolton claimed that Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government” in the book, which was 577 pages long and presented Trump as incredibly ignorant about international affairs.
According to Bolton, Trump usually received only two intelligence briefings per week during his first tenure at the White House, “and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.”
Regarding Ukraine, Bolton claimed that Trump had directly linked the provision of military assistance to US readiness to look into Joe Biden, Trump’s likely opponent in the 2020 Democratic presidential election, and his family. “He wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over,” Bolton wrote, quoting Trump in one exchange.
Moreover, Bolton claimed that he was “hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” pointing out that Trump “pleaded” with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit to improve his chances of winning reelection.
In response, Trump denounced Bolton as a “crazy” war-monger and a “washed-up guy” who would have plunged the US into “World War Six.” At the time, Trump also stated that Bolton “did not have approval” to publish the book and that it included “highly classified information.”
In an effort to prevent the book’s publication, the White House frantically sought an emergency temporary restraining order from a federal judge.
