Vice President JD Vance is defending the federal government’s investigation into former national security adviser John Bolton, as Democrats slam the FBI’s search of his home last Friday as a politically targeted attack.
But Vance also made it clear he couldn’t say what Bolton might have done.
“I’ll let the FBI speak to that,” Vance told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview that aired Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “Classified documents are certainly part of it. But I think that there’s a broad concern about, about Ambassador Bolton. They’re going to look into it. And like I said, if there’s no crime here, we’re not going to prosecute it.”
Bolton, who served as Trump’s top national security official for 17 months during the president’s first term before parting ways in September 2019, emerged as a key critic of the president in recent years. The two sides clashed over a tell-all memoir Bolton published in 2020, which the Trump administration Department of Justice sued to block due to his purported use of classified material.
The acrimony has only increased. “There will be celebrations in the Kremlin” if Trump is elected, Bolton told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki during the presidential campaign last February. More recently, he panned a proposal by the president to end the war in Ukraine and told POLITICO that Trump “thinks he and Putin are friends.”
Trump, in turn, ended Bolton’s government security detail — granted to protect from an assassination threat by Iran — just after returning to the White House in January. He also revoked Bolton’s security clearance, specifically calling out the memoir.
And he called his former adviser “a real sort of a low life” when asked about the FBI search on Friday.
The investigation has drawn the attention of yet another Trump rival also facing legal scrutiny from the president’s Justice Department. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told Welker in an interview airing Sunday that the investigation “is clearly retribution.”
“What the president is trying to do here is very systemic and systematic, and that is anyone who stands up to the president — anyone who criticizes the president, anyone who says anything adverse to the president’s interests — gets the full weight of the federal government brought down on them,” Schiff told Welker. “So if you’re John Bolton, you get your home seized.”
But Vance insisted that the FBI’s investigation was legitimate and free of any political interference.
“If there is a crime here, of course, Ambassador Bolton will get his day in court,” Vance said. “That’s how it should be. But again, our focus here is on did he break the law? Did he commit crimes against the American people? If so, then he deserves to be prosecuted.”
