The FBI raided former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton’s home Friday morning, a spokesperson for the bureau confirmed to the Daily Mail.
Bolton was home at the time of the 7:00 a.m. raid on his D.C.-area house, according to a source familiar.
‘NO ONE is above the law… FBI agents on mission,’ FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a post to X as agents raided Bolton’s home.
It’s part of the FBI’s investigation into the former Trump official involving classified documents.
A senior U.S. official revealed to the New York Post that an investigation, initiated years ago, was halted under President Joe Biden’s administration for ‘political reasons.’
Since leaving his role in April 2018 as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton has frequently clashed with Trump.
He regularly appears in TV interviews criticizing Trump’s national security strategy and foreign policy.
And in response, Bolton has become one of the former officials that the president has taken aim at since getting back into office this year.
Bolton, once with access to highly classified information, lost his security clearance through an order by Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI raided John Bolton’s home early Friday morning, a spokesperson for the bureau confirmed to the Daily Mail
FBI agents descended on John Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland at 7:00 a.m. on Friday, August 22, 2025
On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Trump revoked the clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who in 2020 had implied the Hunter Biden laptop news was a product of Russian disinformation.
In June 2020, Bolton published a memoir about his time working for Trump called The Room Where it Happened.
Bolton’s memoir, claimed to breach a nondisclosure agreement and supposedly jeopardize U.S. national security according to Trump, prompted the president to attempt to bar its publication.
In September 2020, Trump’s first-term Justice Department opened a probe into the book.
But during the Biden years, his DOJ did not pursue the investigation further.
Trump’s Executive Order, upon returning to office, specifically mentioned Bolton’s memoir as a factor in the decision to revoke the security clearances of certain former intelligence officials.
He said Bolton’s ‘reckless treatment of sensitive information’ undermined national security because it risked exposing classified material.
Bolton served for a year-and-a-half as Trump’s top intelligence advisor, but the two have been at odds ever since he parted with the first administration in September 2019
Amid the feud with his former top national security aide, Trump also revoked his Secret Service protection, saying at the time: ‘We’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives. Why should we?’
He called Bolton a ‘very dumb person’ and a ‘warmonger.’
Biden granted Bolton a Secret Service detail after threats emerged from Iran, including a 2022 plot by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard official to assassinate him in retaliation for the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani.
It appears that Bolton predicted the impending raid months ago when he claimed that he would become the center of a ‘retribution’ campaign led by Trump through Patel’s FBI.
‘I don’t think he’s qualified,’ Bolton told the Christian Science Monitor in January when asked about Patel being the next FBI Director.
‘And if there is a retribution campaign, and there certainly seems to be, he would be a central element of it. I think that’s dangerous,’ he added.
