Jonathan Last at The Bulwark reminds us of why the FBI may have turned up at John Bolton’s Maryland home on Friday morning. Bolton served as Trump’s third national security advisor but he only lasted 17 months in the job. After he left, he wrote an unflattering book about his experience in the Trump administration and submitted it to the National Security Council for review. That’s when his trouble began.

Per government requirements, Bolton submitted the book manuscript to the National Security Council for pre-publication review, a process designed to ensure that former government employees do not inadvertently publish classified information. The review process delayed the book’s publication.

On April 27, 2020, after a lengthy negotiation with Ellen Knight, the senior director for records access and information security management at the NSC, Bolton claimed that Knight gave oral approval to move forward with publication.

But on May 2, 2020, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence began a “supplemental” review of the manuscript. The publication date was delayed again.

Bolton had given his publisher permission to move ahead with publication while the Ellis review was still underway.

Bolton’s book had already been printed and bound, and members of the media had obtained advance copies when, on June 17, the government sought an injunction to prevent its release.

President Trump then attempted to have courts strip Bolton of all proceeds from book sales.

The Trump administration initial civil action, U.S. v. Bolton, was followed by an attempt to pursue criminal charges against Bolton.

In the fall of 2020, as the presidential election neared a close, Trump’s DOJ head for national security matters, John Demers, opened the criminal investigation and empaneled a grand jury to determine whether Bolton could be prosecuted for criminally disclosing classified information.

In June 2021, the Department of Justice, under new leadership, dropped its investigation and ended its attempt to hijack the proceeds from book sales.

Because Trump lost the election, Bolton got a reprieve. It could be that this FBI raid is just picking up where Trump left off back in 2021.

Of course, on a certain level we know that irrespective of what is on the warrant the FBI used to enter Bolton’s premises, this is all about payback, spite, and deterrence against anyone in the current administration who might consider writing an unflattering book.

And it’s also true that Bolton is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being a complete shit, so any kind of genuine corruption or criminality on his part is certainly not out of the question. But I don’t need to remind you that Trump is many times more apt to pardon white collar crime than to prosecute it, so even if Bolton has done something that merits arrest, the only reason he’s in deep trouble now is because he got on Trump’s bad side.

There was a time when he served Trump precisely how Trump likes to be served. Take, for example, this snippet from a November 2018 article:

A day after CNN reported that the Justice Department is investigating whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has broken the law by using his office to personally enrich himself, national security adviser John Bolton told the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington that ethics rules make it hard for people outside of the government to serve.

Bolton said “things have gotten more bureaucratic, harder to get things done” since he served under President George H.W. Bush in the 1990s and blamed the difficulty, in part, on the “excessive nature of the so-called ethics checks.”

“If you were designing a system to discourage people from coming into government, you would do it this way,” Bolton said.

A little over a month later, Zinke resigned under the weight of multiple scandals. The Inspector General’s office of the Department of the Interior later found that Zinke and his chief of staff had lied to them about a casino business deal.

As someone who sold the Iraq War to the American people after saying he avoided serving in Vietnam because he “had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” Bolton is not a sympathetic character. But as Martin Niemöller wrote about opposing Hitler, if you don’t support people you don’t like when the fascists come for them, you’ll have a problem when the fascists come for you.

So, if Bolton is being harassed over this old book deal, he deserves everyone’s support. I hate to say it, but it’s true.