The FBI agents who raided the home of former Trump administration adviser-turned-critic John Bolton took a white binder labeled “statements and reflections to allied strikes” and four folders about President Donald Trump, according to documents released by a judge on Thursday at the request of NOTUS and other news organizations.
Federal prosecutors requested permission to search Bolton’s Maryland home on the evening of Aug. 21, a day before a large FBI team descended on his home on a Friday morning.
The government released the application for a search warrant only after a filing by several news organizations including the Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNN.
Although the Justice Department had stayed quiet about the nature of the investigation, newly released federal law enforcement records state that Bolton is being investigated for allegedly violating a law against “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” the same criminal charge Trump faced for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, a case that was ultimately dismissed. Bolton is also being investigated for “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.”
Investigators claim the violations could date as far back as April 9, 2018 — the day Bolton started as Trump’s national security adviser.
The application for a search warrant, which remains partially redacted, offers the first clues into the nature of a criminal investigation that has drawn scrutiny over concerns that Trump is exacting revenge on a once-trusted White House official who has become one of his most vocal detractors.
A list of items taken from Bolton’s home includes two iPhones, four boxes “containing printed daily activities,” and several computers and hard drives. Law enforcement also removed what they described as a “white binder labeled ‘statements and reflections to allied strikes,’ and ‘typed documents in folders labeled ‘Trump I-IV.’”
Bolton’s office did not immediately respond to NOTUS’ questions about the contents of those documents.
It’s unclear whether the documents are related to his past published work.
Bolton drew Trump’s ire in 2020 when he published a memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” describing his time in the president’s first administration. The book recounted Trump’s handling of the withdrawal from the U.S. war on Afghanistan, what he called “dysfunctionality” in the Trump White House, and fresh details about the government’s attempts to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power.
But the first Trump administration attempted to block the book’s initial release, with White House lawyers intervening at the last minute after experienced records officers had already conducted a full review of the book for classified material and had guided Bolton on what to remove from the book before its publication. Ellen Knight, the National Security Council’s senior director for records access and information security management who’d overseen the full review, later blew the whistle over her concerns that the Trump White House was injecting politics into what’s normally a nonpartisan, bureaucratic exercise.
“I was prevented from conveying information that I thought was not properly classifiable, since it revealed information that can only be described as embarrassing to Trump, or as indicative of possible impermissible behavior,” Bolton wrote in his book’s final pages.
Some political commentators have speculated that the recent search might be a continuation of the five-year-old battle over Bolton’s book.
NOTUS last week learned that the Justice Department has taken measures to distance two high-ranking officials from the investigation, given their previous history with Bolton. John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general leading the National Security Division, and Sue Bai, his second-in-command, have formally recused themselves from the investigation, according to a department spokesperson.
The National Security Division typically would be involved in any prosecution relating to criminal mishandling of classified information. Eisenberg and Bai were both White House lawyers during the first Trump administration and were involved in the book review process that tried to stymie its release.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office did not respond to questions about who is taking their place.