MAGA media is showing signs of waking up. Aside from the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga, at least one major issue is now causing the right-wing coalition of President Donald Trump’s supporters in the media to finally suggest that his critics might be on to something. As tends to be the case with conservatives, it took the issue landing, literally, on the front steps of their own colleague for it even to be acknowledged as a potential problem.
On Friday, the FBI executed an unannounced search warrant on the home of former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. Agents arrived at Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., at approximately 7:00 a.m. and were seen carrying boxes out of the home, but no specific reason has yet been given for the search. “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X as the raid commenced. Vice President J.D. Vance shared Patel’s post, as did Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, who added, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”
An FBI investigation into Trump’s outspoken third national security adviser during his first term was initially launched in 2020 and reportedly centered on Bolton’s possible mishandling of classified information related to the upcoming publication of his memoir “The Room Where It Happened.” The probe was eventually shelved in June 2021 under the Biden administration before it was suddenly revived this year. Attorney General Pam Bondi defended Friday’s raid as an act of prudent justice but provided no further details of the investigation.
“What’s at the root of this? Is this about classified documents?” NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked Vance on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”
“We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton. I will say we’re going to let that investigation proceed,” Vance said, implying he is somehow part of the team investigating Bolton. “We’re going to be careful about that. We’re going to be deliberate about that.”
But Trump insisted he did not know about the raid — “I try and stay out of that stuff” — while suggesting that Bolton “could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.” In his Oval Office comments on Friday, the president proceeded to blur the line between an independent Justice Department and his role as president. “I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, believe it or not. You know, I don’t like to go around saying that, but I am. That’s the position.” (In fact, this designation belongs to the attorney general.)
Trump, it should be noted, allegedly withheld classified materials after leaving the White House in 2021 and famously stored them in unsecured locations at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Along with the federal criminal charges in two cases stemming from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his indictment on state charges in Georgia and his felony conviction in New York on 34 charges of falsifying business records, Trump has complained that he has been the target of unjust “weaponization” of the legal system, or what his supporters have dubbed “lawfare.” Of course, those were all different prosecutions in different jurisdictions, and there continues to be no evidence that any of it was coordinated or directed.
Trump and Bolton have long clashed. After returning to office in January, the president revoked the former United Nations ambassador’s security clearance and pulled his security detail, despite credible threats from Iran against the prominent neocon over his hawkish foreign policy positions. Still, Bolton has pressed on with his criticisms of his former boss.
Trump and Bolton have long clashed. After returning to office in January, the president revoked the former United Nations ambassador’s security clearance and pulled his security detail, despite credible threats from Iran against the prominent neocon over his hawkish foreign policy positions. Still, Bolton has pressed on with his criticisms of his former boss. Trump’s “mind is full of mush and he says whatever comes into it,” he said on CNN last week. He recently told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl that “I think he’s already come after me and several others in withdrawing the protection that we had from the Iranians for the attack on Qasem Soleimani. So I think, and I said in the new foreword to the paperback edition of my book, I think it is a retribution presidency.”
While the usual suspects rushed to Trump’s defense after news of the Bolton raid broke Friday, MAGA is far from holding a united front after a former fellow traveler has come under target.
Right-wing influencer and “Pizzagate” progenitor Jack Posobeic told his MAGA audience that “analysts described the raid as a strike against entrenched establishment figures resisting U.S.-Russia peace initiatives, highlighting Bolton’s alignment with interventionist policies and proxy conflicts.” Bolton, for his part, said on CNN last week that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska and that “Putin clearly won.”
“For years in Washington there have been a lot of questions about John Bolton’s associations and the way he’s used his position to benefit himself,” co-host Katie Pavlich claimed on Friday’s edition of “The Five.”
“John Bolton is learning the hard way,” Fox star Laura Ingraham said, “after cheering on lawfare against President Trump.”
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Network hosts and guests have long insisted that the Obama and Biden administrations politicized the Department of Justice. Fox News host and comedian Greg Gutfeld said that is why he isn’t worried about the perception of government weaponization under Trump. “Some say it’s retribution. I say, who cares? You know, don’t lecture me on timing of lawfare. Don’t lecture me on politically-motivated investigations. You guys invented this stuff.” In response to former NBC News anchor Chuck Todd’s admonishment that the “two wrongs make a right” mindset is killing democracy, Gutfeld argued on X that “the only way to prevent you and your friends from targeting the rest of us with bullshit is to guarantee a cost for that behavior. That looks like revenge to you, only because you don’t like it.”
But the raid, perhaps for the first time amid the escalating political retribution that has come to define Trump’s second term, has caused a clear divide between right-wing commentators and subject-matter experts.
On Friday, Trump apologist lawyer Jonathan Turley said on Fox News that “there is a great concern about whether this is retaliation against a political opponent.” Calling it “a very sad development,” the network’s expert legal analyst Andrew McCarthy, a National Review contributor and former assistant U.S. attorney, suggested the raid was retaliatory “lawfare”:
I must say, I think that we saw with President Trump, I was hoping that his administration wouldn’t practice the things that were practiced on him. But a big part of lawfare is to harass people with investigations. So, even if there are never any charges, there’s going to be — there’s already been a search warrant, there’s obviously a criminal investigation that’s underway, there will probably be a grand jury component of it, and even if there is no charges, this will be a very big deal for Bolton personally in the coming months and maybe even years.
CNN’s top MAGA mouthpiece Scott Jennings, speaking on his previous experience as the target of a federal investigation that looked into his time working for top George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, explained the probe could turn Bolton’s “life upside down.” Also on CNN, former Trump campaign senior adviser David Urban acknowledged that the FBI raid “has a really bad look to it” and the timing “looks political.”
The conservative Washington Examiner, where Bolton is a contributing columnist, published a list of unanswered questions about the raid. “The Trump administration has shown a rampant interest in aggressively pursuing its political opponents since Trump reentered office,” Tom Rogan, the outlet’s foreign policy editor, wrote. “The fear, or should-be-fear, is that Trump is weaponizing the DOJ against his political enemies.”
The Wall Street Journal slammed the raid as “vindictive,” calling it out as part of a broader vendetta that Trump telegraphed for years. “President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term,” the editorial board wrote in a scathing op-ed over the weekend. “This is the kind of gratuitous viciousness that has increasingly defined Mr. Trump’s return to office. The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”
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The pattern of retribution by the Trump administration, in just the last week alone, is staggering.
Early last week, after Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J. — whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on May 9 — filed a court filing for the bodycam footage from that day, we learned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had personally ordered Baraka’s arrest.
The New York Times reported last week that Ed Martin, Trump’s “weaponization czar” who was recently selected by the DOJ to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James, recently sent a letter to her lawyer requesting her resignation as an “act of good faith” to “best serve the good of the state and nation.” Simultaneously, Trump called for the resignation of Lisa D. Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve, after Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte posted on X last week that he had sent a criminal referral letter to the Justice Department accusing Cook of committing mortgage fraud.
And in another apparent act of “Russiagate” revenge, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced on X last week that, at Trump’s direction, the agency is revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials, several of whom were involved in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Last month, the DOJ launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation.
It’s a clear pattern, and it should be covered by the media as such. As Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., pointed out on “Meet the Press” Sunday, the Bolton raid is part of the administration’s “intimidation campaign” — and it looks like MAGA might be finally starting to catch on.
