President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser believes his old boss pulled his Secret Service protection as part of a broader “retribution” campaign against political foes. And he worries that the campaign is just beginning.
John Bolton, a foreign policy hawk who left the Trump administration in 2019 and quickly turned into a sharp Trump critic, has had Secret Service protection since 2021 because of credible threats that Iran was trying to assassinate him. Mr. Trump ended that protection when he returned to office – even though the threat hasn’t changed.
Mr. Bolton believes that the revenge campaign could get much more severe if President Trump gets his choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kash Patel, who worked under Mr. Bolton at the National Security Council during the first Trump term, will get his confirmation hearing in the Senate later this week. Mr. Bolton warns that he could be “a central element” of a larger series of reprisals.
Why We Wrote This
President Trump’s rhetoric raised pre-inauguration fears that he’ll pursue reprisals against perceived enemies. We have an interview with a former Trump adviser, John Bolton, who says he is already feeling the heat.
The Monitor spoke to Mr. Bolton on Monday. The following transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity:
How did you find out that President Trump had ended your Secret Service protection? Where were you when you found out?
At about 11:30 on the night of January the 20th, Inauguration Day, the Secret Service came and knocked on my door and said one of the supervisory agents wanted to talk to me. And he basically said, ‘We wanted to let you know tonight, rather than tomorrow morning. But the president’s ordered the protection to be ended at noon on Tuesday.’
I think the Secret Service was trying to do me a favor, so that I’d know about it sooner rather than later.
So you basically had roughly 12 hours’ warning. Have you arranged your own protection at this point? Are you paying out of pocket?
I can’t really comment on any specifics in that regard, as I hope you can understand. But measures are in place, let’s put it that way.
Why do you think President Trump ended your security detail?
Let me go back. The reason [President] Biden re-extended Secret Service protection to me in late 2021 was because of the threat that I faced. It wasn’t political on Biden’s part. He and his advisors couldn’t be terribly happy about all the things I was writing about them. But they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. You can’t leave American officials unprotected against that kind of threat.
When Trump comes in, the threat level hasn’t changed. In fact, I was told by both Homeland Security and the FBI, literally a few days before Inauguration Day, that the threat level was the same.
There’s only one interpretation that makes any sense. It was political. And this is part of an effort at retribution.
Do you believe that, as he promised on the campaign trail, President Trump is using his administration to enact vengeance on political foes?
Look at what he did when he pulled protection for [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and [senior Pompeo aide] Brian Hook. That was really amazing to most people because they thought that, although Pompeo had made some criticisms of Trump, that he had basically been loyal to him.
It shows there’s never enough loyalty to Trump.
I don’t believe anybody’s entitled to anything. But to allow our government to function in national security areas, you can’t have foreign governments threatening to kill people and taking steps to kill people without doing something about it.
A few Republican senators including Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have called on President Trump to reverse his decision to strip you and Pompeo of protection. Have you been in contact with any GOP senators in recent days?
I have not been in contact with any of them.
You say this seems to be an effort at retribution from the Trump administration. The Senate is set to hold a confirmation hearing this week on Kash Patel to be director of the FBI. You worked with him a bit at the National Security Council. Are you worried that if he becomes head of the FBI that he may use the bureau as a tool of retribution against Trump’s political foes?
I think the central characteristic Trump seems to be looking for in all of the appointees we’ve seen so far is fealty to him. A lot of people say it’s loyalty. Loyalty is a virtue, it’s a good thing. That’s not what Trump wants. He wants fealty to him. He wants submissiveness. He wants yes-men and yes-women. And Kash Patel has demonstrated, in his service in Trump’s first term, that he’ll simply do whatever Trump wants.
I don’t think he’s qualified. 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.
You recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal laying out why you believe he shouldn’t be confirmed. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with Kash Patel when he was at NSC?
Trump was persuaded to hire him after Republicans lost their majority in the House [in 2018], and Republican staff on all the committees decreased, including Intelligence [where he had previously been working]. And I resisted. My deputy Charlie Kupperman resisted. Because in checking around, we found what he was claiming about his Justice Department experience was overstated. And in the kinds of positions people have on the NSC staff, that’s just too much of a risk.
He was pushed on us. And ultimately, a president can hire who he wants to.
But I left shortly thereafter. I didn’t really have a lot of experience with him other than having to hire him.
You wrote in your op-ed that Mr. Patel’s conduct during Mr. Trump’s first term indicates that as FBI director he would operate according to Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria’s reported comment to Joseph Stalin: ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’ Do you think that he might weaponize the FBI to prosecute people for political reasons?
The point of the Beria quote is that if you look long enough, if somebody did something bad in seventh grade, and if you don’t have a statute of limitations problem, you can prosecute them for that. And that’s just not how our system of justice functions. It’s not even a question of just the FBI. That’s not what we do. We don’t follow the Beria model. But I think Trump does.
It’s not just the Justice Department. You could imagine IRS audits and other things as part of the harassment. The security details is another.
But if the investigatory resources of the FBI are turned full-blast on somebody, the odds of finding something [are high]. Even if they don’t prosecute it, [they] could leak information that should never become public, to damage the reputation of whoever the targets are.
The eye of history will be upon all these senators who vote in favor of him. Because that gives him, and Trump, the license that I’m very worried they want – to go after anybody, up to and including the senators who voted in favor of him, if they fall out of favor.
Given all that has transpired since then, do you regret not having testified during his first impeachment in 2019?
No. As I say in my book, the Democrats had committed impeachment malpractice. The House members were so obsessed about impeachment, they forgot about conviction.
And the Constitution obviously requires two-thirds of the Senate to convict. And they just never made any serious effort to get Republicans to see the nature of it. They wanted the quick and dirty, and that’s what they got. Contrast [that] with Watergate – eventually, Republicans were brought around, to the point where Nixon had to resign.
I think all this was entirely foreseeable right from the beginning of the effort. As Machiavelli once said, ‘You must either caress a prince or kill him.’ If you go after Trump and don’t get a conviction, you’re not constraining him, you’re not limiting him. You’re enabling him. You’re empowering him. And that’s exactly what happened in the first impeachment.
Do you think that rule follows with the legal investigations and court cases that Trump faced in between his terms in office? Do you think that the prosecutions that he faced over the last few years have emboldened him, and also heightened the risk of him doing what he thinks as payback?
I mean, if you’re against the weaponization of the Justice Department because you think it was weaponized against you, then you don’t make the situation worse by weaponizing it against your opponents. I understand the temptation. People feel aggrieved.
The signs, with Kash Patel at the FBI, are that they are going to pursue retribution. So on their terms, on what Trump himself would say about justice, it takes a bad situation and makes it worse.
Are you worried about the degradation of the rule of law and democracy with Trump back in power?
I think Trump will do a lot of damage. I’ve never thought he was an existential threat to democracy. Our institutions are much stronger than Donald Trump. But he can cause damage. And that’s not a good thing.
