A raid on Bolton
John Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019. It seemed an odd choice, because Bolton is a hawk and Trump is a Jacksonian on foreign policy, which is not the same thing. Bolton had good credentials, having served under both Reagan and Bush, and had been Bush’s hard-nosed UN Ambassador for about a year and a half.
At a certain point Bolton openly turned against Trump – although I’m not sure he was all that supportive even from the start (here’s an article that claims to describe the downward trajectory of their relationship). But by the time he ended his tenure in the administration, Bolton was Trump’s enemy who wrote a book in 2020 excoriating Trump.
That’s not the issue. The issue is whether he leaked classified information. The proceedings against Bolton are framed by the left in this way: “the justice system is being turned on Trump’s political critics.”
Gee whiz, CNN; did you notice the lawfare against Trump and anyone with the temerity to support him? Did you notice the weakness of their cases? Do you remember “no one is above the law”? I suppose you think Trump’s enemies should get immunity from any prosecution, and a medal?
The real question is whether Bolton is guilty of leaking classified materials and whether his actions fit the definition of a crime, without gymnastics by prosecutors to make it somehow fit when it doesn’t.
FBI agents raided the Maryland home and Washington, DC office of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton Friday morning in a high-profile probe of allegations that he sent “highly sensitive” classified documents to his family from a private email server while working in the White House. …
Bolton has not been arrested and is not currently charged with any crimes, the administration official added. …
Investigators reopened a dormant probe into Bolton’s alleged use of a private email to send classified national security documents to his wife and daughter from his work desk before his dismissal by Trump in September 2019, according to a senior US official.
“While Bolton was a national security adviser, he was literally stealing classified information, utilizing his family as a cutout,” this person charged.
The probe was initially opened in 2020, and continued into the Biden administration, which froze the investigation. …
Justice Department officials who also served during the Biden administration purportedly told Trump officials that they had been “trying to prosecute this case for four years, and the [Biden DOJ] shut it down,” according to the senior official.
So this may end up with no charges, or it may turn into something big.
NOTE: Many years ago – I think it was in 2012, when he briefly was a presidential candidate – I went to a presentation by Bolton. There was almost no one there. That meant that after the lecture I was able to have a very long talk with him. I don’t remember the content, but I recall him as smart, personable, and responsive to questions. Of course, that was prior to the Trump years.
In the early years, I too thought well of him. Then something happened. It would not surprise me if there is some truth to the suspicions of wrongdoing. Too many former insiders have high level security clearances and use that to feather their own nest.
Personally, I never like Bolton. Always the smartest guy in the room, even when he wasn’t. Way too much of a Hawk.
Robert Stacy McCain offered the view that if political retribution were the object, it would be odd to give priority to Bolton. There’s a long line of characters who were much more troublesome to Trump than Bolton.
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Bolton’s very much a Washington figure, bouncing between discretionary positions in government, law firms, think tanks, venture capital firms &c. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was someone who used confidential information to his advantage. (See James Comey). It wouldn’t surprise me if some of his assets are ill-gotten gains, but he appears to do this on a smaller scale than some other men about town in Washington.
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I’m going to wager his issue with Trump was fundamentally a personality conflict.
Ditto what Neo and Voice said; of course, I wasn’t reading blogs everyday during most of Bolton’s career, so I missed a lot of things.
I agree with most of Art Deco’s comment, but even allowing that personality differences were almost certainly operating, I would look for even more friction in their policy choices.
It may be that Bolton was trying to bully Trump* into agreeing with him because of his greater experience, whereas Trump was adamant about following his own path for international affairs, even if he seemed to be “going along to get along” on domestic issues.
I don’t think he is as ignorant about the world (and other things) as the Establishment figures reflexively assume to this day.
And now he is being supported by his administration instead of being knee-capped by them.
*Those would be some conversations I wish someone would leak video of!
Trump, while not a pacifist, hates war. Bolton views war as a valid tool for foreign policy.
We shall see what the allegations against him are.
Neo is correct to excoriate CNN for casting Trump as the only one politicizing the law, while Fox doesn’t really address that aspect, probably because their audiences are copasetic with those differing viewpoints (Fox readers know the same things we do about politically motivated lawfare hit jobs against Trump).
It’s interesting that the Fox News piece doesn’t remark that Bolton worked for them, although CNN mentions it: “Trump, during that first term, was churning through national security advisers with regularity, and Bolton jumped from his role as a Fox News analyst to the White House in March of 2018 after promising Trump “he wouldn’t start any wars” if he was selected, CNN reported at the time.”
The CNN post is a general bio of Bolton’s career and skimps on the details of his conflicts with Trump, whereas the Fox post does the reverse.
My reading is that CNN is burnishing Bolton’s image as the Establishment Hero (even if working for the Other Side) and thus a victim of Trump’s rancor.
Fox, on the other hand, highlights the ways that Bolton clashed with Trump’s preferred strategies for dealing with international regimes, justifying his departure from the Administration (forced or voluntary seems to still be in dispute).
This was the final straw in that conflict, per Fox (but omitted by CNN): “Days ahead of Bolton’s ouster, Trump was slated to meet with Taliban leaders in an effort to negotiate peace in Afghanistan, but the meeting never took place and Bolton reportedly slammed such an effort in conversations with Trump, media outlets reported at the time.”
Do we know who reported those conversations “at the time,” or is that one thing the FBI is looking to discover? Inquiring minds want to know.
The major argument for a Trump vendetta would be this event, omitted by Fox but featured on CNN: “Allegations from Bolton’s 2020 memoir, in which he roasted Trump’s leadership and accused the president of improperly using foreign policy to his domestic political advantage, featured prominently in the first of Trump’s two first-term impeachments. Trump was acquitted in both impeachments and he said that Bolton should be put in jail for what he wrote.”
And thus we see that it is necessary to read a blogger of Neo’s acumen, who gives us both reports to compare and contrast, just like our best professors used to do (judging from the news about the American education system, even the colleges have given that up).
Bolton thought it was appropriate to raid Mar-A-Lago for classified material and was very concerned at the time about the handling of classified material, and was sure that no partisan motives were at work.
It’s not surprising that two strong personalities like Trump and Bolton would eventually clash. My take on Trump’s somewhat surprising selection of Bolton as national security advisor was that he wanted to implement a good cop/bad cop foreign policy with Bolton as the bad cop.
We’ll see how the allegations pan out. If they involve classified leaks there may be more to it than personal retribution. And as always the Dems are hugely hypocritical when they claim to care about Bolton.
I wonder if this sets the stage for something else?
As far as Neo’s quality of writing, we’re here aren’t we.
a little perspective here
https://x.com/shipwreckedcrew/status/1959277865394180396
what seems to be clear, is royce lamberth is of very little utility
recently, with the J6 sham trials, but even farther back
to the mess with the moussaoui laptop
hes been good on some cases re native american rights and some matters with the clinton administration,
I admired john bolton back when he seemed to be against the arms control clericy, he was a members of the PNAC report, but he had little real imput into the Iraq invasion eventually, everything is a nail, and all you have are hammers,
Investigations into Bolton, Brennan, Clapper, Comey … Trump’s DOJ is finally looking deeply into the activities of prominent members of the Deep State.
If you’re innocent, you have nothing to worry about, right? RIght? Guys?
RELATED — News maker long form interview with John Solomon of JustTheNews (and former editor at The Hill). Only hour old.
“After 9 Years of Investigation, Here’s What I Uncovered | John Solomon” In the American Thought Leaders series by Epoch Times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOn_kiy7cas
Solomon opens by telling us that Russiagate built on the political “dirty tricks” seen in the Watergate break in. His premise is that we’ve always seen such misdeeds in political campaigns.
The difference in 2016-17 was the unification of the US intel apparatus with the media to sell their dirty tricks on Trump.
This poses major hurdles for our open popularly governed society, in an age of total institutional distrust.
How can this be changed? Our epoch times, indeed.
THE BEST authoritative overview of the past decades-long biggest US political scandal ever. Sobering yet detailed.
FINISHED listening to Solomon’s interview, we get career background I’d not known before about him.
-AP’s Chief investigative journalist during the 1990s.
-one year at the Washington post, enjoying his own byline.
-Solomon’s work about Intel agency failures in the lead up to 9/11 are heavily cited in the subsequent 9/11 Commission’s report.
The failure of other journalists to follow-up obvious tells in the last decade either mystifies or frustrates him. Or both!
At around 39m, says that we’ve been in an ongoing War Against the Truth.
Which defines our present historical moment.
Thus, the next few years will be crucial in deciding if the US can lead Western Civilization in the pursuit of equal justice or not — and if not, then the perversion or mutilation of Truth-telling shall prevail.
An interesting note from Wikipedia, if it is correct. If it is, then he probably did the same with President Trump, or could plausibly have been suspected of doing so.
“Bolton has often been accused of attempting to pressure the intelligence community to endorse his views.[63][64][65] According to former coworkers, Bolton withheld information that ran counter to his goals from Secretary of State Colin Powell on multiple occasions, and from Powell’s successor Condoleezza Rice on at least one occasion.[65][66]”
I believe the country would have a much more discernible foreign policy if the unelected bureaucrats would leave the decisions to the elected officials, even if the resulting policy is not necessarily more rational or more correct (for certain values of both qualities).
At least the officials would be making decisions knowing the known knowns & known unknowns, rather than being blindsided by the unknowable secrets of their supposed advisors.
@ TJ > “FINISHED listening to Solomon’s interview, we get career background I’d not known before about him.”
I didn’t know all of Solomon’s background, but I have long considered him one of the best investigative journalists on the internet, with the most informative and well-analyzed posts.
Wikipedia’s article seemed to be fair in its treatment of Bolton’s career (AFAIK, which isn’t all that far), until I reached this sentence, produced with only the evidence of an NBC News report: “From 2013 until March 2018, Bolton was chairman of the far-right anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, which is prominent for disseminating false anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim information.[204]”
A few paragraphs onward:
“In July 2013, Bolton was identified as a key member of Groundswell, a secretive coalition of right-wing activists and journalists attempting to advance political change behind the scenes through lobbying of high-level contacts.[211]”
And this is different from Democrat operations in what way?
There are some details about the book’s numerous reviews for classified information that muddy the water pretty thoroughly. Approval seems to have been an on-again, off-again process, which is hard on publishers and authors.
NBC doesn’t have enough truth-telling credibility for me to take their assessment as controlling. I read Gatestone from time to time, the stories aren’t wildly reactionary, and it’s well-known (in some circles anyway) that the Left believes anything criticizing immigrants and Muslims is far-right phobias.
A personal note: I object to Wikipedia’s practice of citing “information” from news articles and independent pundits (books, printed press, broadcasts, or online) as if what they said was undeniable fact, rather than opinion. There are a number of places where the text should insert an “alleged” or “in the view of” before the statements.
Two comments replying to Aesopfan’s assessment of Wikipedia weakness and bias over Bolton.
First, whenever “far right” is used as a label (by NBC News), two consequences follow. The label is false, and the subsequent charges misleading hackery.
Rather than exploring this well-trod ground, I’ll turn to on Friday on cable TV bias.
I’ve noticed CNN and FNC arriving at contradictory claims about Bolton’s
vetting of documents for his Trump insider book. On CNN, they conclude that Bolton’s writings were properly vetted and permitted. By contrast, on FNC, this claim is rejected, stating again and again that the Biden administration quashed proper vetting by established proceedings.
Given the first example, anyone want to bet on which news source is correct about Bolton’s classified book vetting?
Not a fan of this. Trump is simply trying to settle petty personal grudes via Lawfare and we’re trying to justify it because it was done to him.
I prefer intellectual consistency on the right. I realize Trump isn’t conservative or consistent, but doesn’t mean we have to applaud this.
Who is this “we’re”? Being as you are a bot dispatched to carry forward the talking points of the day?
Does faithful execution of the laws ring any bells? Consistency in that respect is all one might ask, and so far as I can see Trump’s administration is head and shoulders above the progressive transformationists of Obama and his gang. Carry on then: let the wheels of just procedure turn and grind.
I’m taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude on the Bolton raid. If the evidence exists, it’ll come out in due time.
Bolton was the best of the neocons, in many ways. He was willing to state unpleasant truths out loud, and unlike most of the Bush II Administration, he was willing to take the lies from the Dems and the media complex and fight back against them.
Unfortunately, he was still part of the Establishment and emotionally and psychologically just couldn’t cope with Trump. It broke him (and not just him).
— AesopFan
To be fair, we need to admit that Trump II is a different foreign policy beast than Trump I.
Trump was naive about how Washington worked, and how the world worked, in his first term. He thought he could negotiate war away, take it off the table as a foreign policy tool, just pull out and come one. Probably, based on what he said at the time, he bought into the whole ‘Bush lied and people died’ lie.
Reality, of course, is that war is the nature of things and as the world’s dominant power, we can’t just come home and have peace. The world won’t cooperate.
Trump has been clearly learning that lesson further dealing with Putin in the Ukrainian situation, which simply has no good answers.
So Bolton probably had some right on his side in his arguments with Trump in the first term. Not that that justifies his later actions. As I said above, Trump broke the GOP establishment at a basic level.
— TJ
Yes. It’s driven in part by crass political considerations, in part by political ideology shading over into emotional desperation.
The former is straightforward, the ruling class trying desperately to retain their power, wealth, and social status (don’t underestimate the importance of that last) against a rising popular resentmant and rebellion.
But there’s a deeper element to this. Today’s top level Western and American ruling class are most highly-educated well-off (though not always rich) Boomers, and they came of age in the late ’60s and ’70s. To a very large extent, their ideological core is John Lennon’s Imagine.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/imagine.html
Read those lyrics, and you’re seeing a charter or descriptive of how the modern Western ruling class thinks, emotionally. Even when they don’t live that way (Imagine no possessions? The ruling class? Yeah right.) they emotionally identify with the sentiment. One world. Totally secular. No war. Leave The Past Behind.
Another indicator that is far more diagnostic that it looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAJVN3ICCFY&t=5s
That’s a Coke commercial from 1977. Of course it’s fundamentally a cynical attempt to harness the hippy-ish vibe for commercial purposes, but look at the multiracial, multicultural illusion it spins. That too taps into the emotional resonances of the elite educated Boomers who run things now. They don’t live it, and know in their heads that it’s not real, but the ideal touched on in the song and the Coke commercial remains central to their thinking.
Which in turn leads them to implement policies that the general public hate, which they’ve been doing for decades and built up a tremendous backlash against. This in turn forces them to wage war on reality to protect the emotional ideal.
Which IMHO drives a lot of the ‘war on truth’. Yes, they’re defending their own personal power and status, but they’re also half-consciously defending an emotional craving against a world that won’t permit it.
“Gee whiz, CNN; did you notice the lawfare against Trump and anyone with the temerity to support him?”
So, is there now a Transitive Law of Wrongdoing, whereby if A (Democrats) do wrong against B (Trump), it is acceptable for B to do wrong against C (Bolton)?
If there was a case against Bolton, it should have been brought promptly in the previous Trump administration. Waiting five years is fishy.
@Kurt Schuler:Waiting five years is fishy.
There was an obstacle in that five years, an intervening administration that had no interest in pursuing the matter further.
Today’s top level Western and American ruling class are most highly-educated well-off (though not always rich) Boomers, and they came of age in the late ’60s and ’70s. To a very large extent, their ideological core is John Lennon’s Imagine.
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The people you’re describing retired a decade ago, for the most part.
whereby if A (Democrats) do wrong against B (Trump), it is acceptable for B to do wrong against C (Bolton)?
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It hasn’t been established that any wrong has been done to Bolton. If you’re complaining about delays, address your complaint to Wm. Barr and Merrick Garland.
Thinking about Bolton’s situation and his probable respect for the necessity of classifying documents and providing specialized treatment of their handling/ transport/ etc. within a national security context, I have trouble believing he would have purposefully “misbehaved” in that arena. Legitimate errors or misunderstandings could occur, of course, when you handle a lot of that secret stuff. Or arrogance could grow large enough to believe the rules can be elided on occasion.
But I am with HC68 on this: “If the evidence exists, it’ll come out in due time.”
@ R2L > “If the evidence exists, it’ll come out in due time.”
That seems to be the trend, now that Trump’s people have access to the data banks and the burn bags.
@ Kurt > “So, is there now a Transitive Law of Wrongdoing, whereby if A (Democrats) do wrong against B (Trump), it is acceptable for B to do wrong against C (Bolton)?”
No one here or the other conservative places I follow has said anything like that.
Trump’s DOJ is now investigating allegations against Bolton that have nothing to do with what the Democrats did to him, but are consequent to credible evidence that he did indeed do something illegal.
If he didn’t, then there will be no charges.
A more common formulation on the Left is to ask “If A (Democrats) do wrong against B (Trump), it is acceptable for B to do wrong against A?”
It is now abundantly clear that the Democrats did do actual wrong against Trump, starting in 2016, by MAKING UP accusations, at the highest levels of government, and promoting them through the corrupt media.
If what they had done was directed against someone other than Trump, it would certainly not be wrong to investigate their actions.
Therefore, investigating them for any illegal actions they engaged in while colluding against Trump (which has become quite a long list) is NOT doing “wrong” against them.
That Bolton’s case is mere revenge is an assertion of a type made by the left in many cases. They know they’re lying but they will make you waste your time proving it. To no avail, since they know they’re lying, not merely misinformed. And they’ll do it again….
— Art Deco
Not really relevant, not entirely true.
A generation is over 20 years long as a rule, the people I’m talking about were born between 1943 and the middle sixties, as a rule. (I know the Baby Boom generation ‘officially’ starts in 1945, but for various reasons I believe it should actually be counted at 1943).
The mindset I’m talking about permeates the educated class of that whole generation to a substantial degree (and many of those who don’t share it instead subscribe to Ayn Rand’s fantasy world to one degree or another).
A 20 year old in 1977 (the year of the Christmas ad I linked) would be about 68 now. The last of the Boomer cohorts would only be about 60 or so now. That whole generation is now the ‘elder’ generation, and both those who have retired and those who remain employed shape the culture and set the tone of the era, the same way the GI generation did from middle sixties to the middle 80s. They’re still very much shaping policy and culture and attitudes.
Which is not to say that the ‘Lennonist’ mindset is unique to them! Many educated Xers and Millenials/Gen Z (which are two subwaves of a single generation) share it. But the elite Boomers are the center of radiation.
Actual generations are about 30 years in length.
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The dimensions of American birth cohorts were at their nadir in 1936 and at their peak in 1957. There’s your ‘baby boom’.
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People born during the years running from 1958 to 1970 tended (more often than not) to vote Republican in their youth.
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Someone who was 21 years old the year “Imagine” was released was born in 1950. The majority of such people had retired by 2014. Someone born in 1957 was eligible for full Social Security last year.
The elite boomers set the table for the next generations’education on such matters. As such, their retirement is not particularly relevant.
You mean no one else sets tables?
— Art Deco
Not really. The characteristics that define a generation’s collective mindset are about 20 years or so, because that’s how long it takes the reach adulthood.
— Art Deco
But the demographic literal baby boom only provides a name to the generation born from the mid 40s to the early-mid 60s. It doesn’t define them.
— Art Deco
Yes, the last wave of the Boomers shifted toward Reagan and formed the foundation of the Right-wing hard core.
— Art Deco
None of which matters. The song is not the source of the mindset, it’s an expression of it, just as the Coke commercial from 1977 is. They are diagnostic, but not causal. The mindset they embody permeated the educated elite Boomers. In lefties it drew them to Howard Zinn and Marx and Bernie Sanders. In right wing Boomers it tended to produce Ayn Rand fixation.
But note that both groups end up calling for open borders,. for different reasons. They’re both one worlders, just coming at it from different directions. That some convergence shows up on many issues.