The FBI has searched the home and office of Donald Trump‘s former national security adviser, John Bolton. This action is a major escalation in the federal government’s examination of how he managed classified information. While public attention has mostly focused on his controversial memoir, called The Room Where It Happened, Fox News claims that a source told the outlet that the investigation now goes far beyond that one publication.
This has increased speculation that Bolton could be facing criminal charges. Bolton’s greatest legal risk may come from the early drafts of his book. A well-known national security attorney has said that Bolton could be in legal danger if he kept copies of the first versions of his manuscript.
The attorney, Mark Zaid, said, “With respect to Bolton’s book, he is potentially vulnerable if he maintains any copies of early drafts which were determined to contain ‘voluminous’ amounts of classified information when it was first submitted to the White House for review. Those drafts were likely disseminated, per normal course of business, to his literary agent, publisher and lawyer.”
John Bolton may end up being tried as a spy
The current legal situation is similar to a dispute that occurred during the previous Trump administration. At that time, Attorney General Bill Barr started an investigation into Bolton’s actions and filed a civil lawsuit to stop the book from being published.
The Department of Justice argued that Bolton had not completed the correct prepublication review process, which resulted in a manuscript containing sensitive national security information being printed. In his own defense, Bolton stated that he did not originally believe the book contained any classified material, though he did make some changes after talking with the National Security Council. He claimed the administration’s decision not to approve the book was a misuse of the review process and an effort to stop a publication that was critical of the President at the time.
In a ruling on that civil case, a judge in Washington, D.C., ultimately decided not to stop the book’s publication because it had already been widely distributed. However, the judge did not excuse Bolton’s behavior. The judge criticized the former adviser, writing that he had taken a risk with national security and put the country in potential danger.
FBI RAIDS JOHN BOLTON’S HOME Over Classified Book Leak https://t.co/5g81zmevM8 via @YouTube
— Civic Duty(@CivicDuty465256) August 26, 2025
The court found it very probable that Bolton had endangered national security by revealing classified information, which was a violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed while working for the government. Even with these conclusions, the Department of Justice never pursued criminal charges against him, and the Biden administration ended the investigation and dismissed the civil lawsuit in the middle of 2021.
The return of this issue has attracted new criticism, with some commentators suggesting that political motives drive the new investigation. Bolton is the most recent in a line of people who have disagreed with the current President and then become the focus of a federal investigation. This pattern includes grand jury investigations into people like New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff.
