FILE PHOTO: Former White House national security adviser John Bolton arrives at his house following its search by the FBI in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., August 22, 2025. REUTERS/Tasos Katopodis/File Photo
The Trump administration's raid on the home of his former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been roundly criticized as a weaponization of the justice system — but there may be a bit more to the story, analyst Ken Dilanian told MSNBC's Katy Tur on Friday.
Specifically, he said, the Biden administration began the original investigation into whether Bolton exposed classified information — and their decision not to pursue it was not due to a lack of evidence.
"The search warrant into John Bolton's home has just been released," said Tur. "A lot of it is pretty heavily redacted. I mean, just pages of redactions ... so I imagine that you don't have much of a handle on the full text of it, but what can you tell us in these preliminary moments?"
"I do have some context on this, Katy, and in part because The New York Times reported something significant that I've confirmed," said Dilanian. "There's a whole section of that affidavit. I think it's the most important section that's blacked out under the heading 'A hack of John Bolton's AOL account by a foreign government.'"
"What I understand from two sources, and what The New York Times has reported, is that the United States government obtained John Bolton's emails, some of those emails, from an adversarial foreign government, unnamed. And in that dump contained evidence that led to some concerns about his handling of classified information. And this happened during the Biden administration. Katy, the Biden Justice Department reviewed this. They opted not to bring charges. They didn't conduct a search. In part, I'm told there were concerns about the sensitivity of how they acquired that information and that, in fact, it's quite damaging that the public has been told that they acquired these emails from that foreign government, because that foreign government now knows that the United States had access to their systems."
"Nonetheless, it's out and we're reporting it," he added. "Again, it's blacked out in the affidavit, but — and we don't know what the evidence is, but it was enough to convince two separate federal judges that there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed and that the evidence was in John Bolton's home. And so the FBI has carried out those searches. We haven't heard anything since about potential charges or whether they uncovered significant evidence, but that's sort of where that stands."