The FBI raided former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton’s home Friday morning, a spokesperson for the bureau confirmed to the Daily Mail.
Bolton was home at the time of the 7:00 a.m. raid on his D.C.-area house, according to a source familiar.
It also appeared that his wife Gretchen was at one point in the doorway of their home speaking with the federal agents.
‘NO ONE is above the law… FBI agents on mission,’ FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a post to X as agents raided Bolton’s home.
The raid is part of the FBI’s investigation into the former Trump official involving classified documents.
The probe was first launched in 2020 but an administration officials tells the Daily Mail that it was quashed during President Joe Biden‘s administration for ‘political reasons.’ Patel’s FBI has reopened the high profile case.
Bolton, who served as President Donald Trump‘s NSA from April 2018 until September 2019, has been at odds with Trump ever since parting with the first administration.
He regularly appears in TV interviews criticizing Trump’s national security strategy and foreign policy.
And in response, Bolton has become one of the former officials that the president has taken aim at since getting back into office this year.
Once privy to some of the most classified information in the world, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stripped Bolton of his security clearance.
The FBI raided John Bolton’s home early Friday morning, a spokesperson for the bureau confirmed to the Daily Mail
FBI agents descended on John Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland at 7:00 a.m. on Friday, August 22, 2025
On his first day back in office on January 20, 2025, Trump ordered the clearances be revoked of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
In June 2020, Bolton published a memoir about his time working for Trump called The Room Where it Happened.
The president tried to block its publication, claiming Bolton breached a nondisclosure agreement he signed as a condition of his employment. He also argued that the memoir endangered U.S. national security.
In September 2020, Trump’s first-term Justice Department opened a probe into the book.
But during the Biden years, his DOJ did not pursue the investigation further.
Trump’s Executive Order once back in office specifically cited Bolton’s memoir as part of stripping the security clearances of former intelligence officials.
He said Bolton’s ‘reckless treatment of sensitive information’ undermined national security because it risked exposing classified material.
Bolton served for a year-and-a-half as Trump’s top intelligence advisor, but the two have been at odds ever since he parted with the first administration in September 2019
John Bolton lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife Gretchen Smith Bolton
Amid the feud with his former top national security aide, Trump also revoked his Secret Service protection, saying at the time: ‘We’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives. Why should we?’
He called Bolton a ‘very dumb person’ and a ‘warmonger.’
Biden granted Bolton a Secret Service detail after threats emerged from Iran, including a 2022 plot by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard official to assassinate him in retaliation for the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani.
It appears that Bolton predicted the impending raid months ago when he claimed that he would become the center of a ‘retribution’ campaign led by Trump through Patel’s FBI.
‘I don’t think he’s qualified,’ Bolton told the Christian Science Monitor in January when asked about Patel being the next FBI Director.
‘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,’ he added.
