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FBI Searches Home of Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired August 22, 2025 - 08:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[08:00:00]

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Classified information, Trump was saying that any conversation with him was classified and thus none of it should have been able to be revealed in John Bolton's book. That then led to a grand jury investigation of John Bolton in the District of Columbia's federal court. It resulted in no charges.

So what this is, is there a link to that situation? Is this, this is official that we know has a lot of classified information over his long tenured service in government? So John Bolton now being under investigation again after not being in government for several years, we are going to have a lot of questions going forward.

I've reached out to John Bolton's attorney who handled his issues through the first grand jury investigation and CNN reached Bolton directly this morning. Bolton said he was unaware of this FBI activity and was looking into it further -- John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Katelyn Polantz, for us digging on this in Washington. As this information continues to come in, one point Katelyn's making there.

John Bolton had high profile lawyers the first time around. He himself, a very accomplished lawyer as well. Just to keep in mind, those critics and supporters of him would both, I think, concede that point.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, and remember, it was since, since Trump came into office, he also stripped Bolton of a security clearance as well. This is not the first time that they've gone after him.

I remember at the time, Bolton, I think he kind of laughed about it because it wasn't as if he was looking for any, going to be leaning on that any time soon. Let's continue covering this breaking news.

Andy McCabe is sticking with us, Meghan Hays, David Urban, Katelyn Polantz here as well.

David, I was just looking back to just last week, because John referenced it, which is the president was very unhappy with John Bolton and what he was saying, his take and his analysis of the president's meeting with Putin. I'm going to read this for you. This is what President Trump put out on social media. This was just a week ago on August 13th.

Very unfair media at work on my meeting with Putin, constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton, who just said that even though the meeting is on American soil, Putin has already won. What's that all about?

That clearly, John -- what do you think it is about John Bolton that gets so under Donald Trump's skin?

DAVID URBAN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, you know, he clearly doesn't agree with the president. He clearly, you know, attacks him on a wide variety of fronts. Some justified, some perhaps not.

But it's been pointed out. This doesn't stem, I don't believe, from this past week. I think this stems going back to 2020 when when John Bolton published this book and the manuscript was leaked after the National Security Council told Bolton's lawyers that it was not -- it could not be published because it contained classified information and it was going to be a problem.

And the manuscript leaked to different news outlets. And it was a quite a kerfuffle. If you remember back in 2020, it was a big deal in terms of what was being published and what wasn't. And there was a lot of questions.

And so I think this is, you know, 100 percent about that and not so much about the most recent brush up between John Bolton and the president.

BERMAN: No, but the timing, I think, will be called into question, given, of course, that John Bolton hasn't held a government job in years and years and years. And it comes following some very public criticism from the president.

Andy McCabe, to you, what exactly does a court authorized search mean? What are the types of things that are searched for when officers walk into that house?

And in a normal FBI, in a standard FBI, what hurdles would you have to surmount in order to get to the point where you go to a judge to ask for this warrant?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Sure. So the court authorized activity or however they're describing it is only one thing. It means that the FBI has a search warrant, which means that agents who are already conducting an investigation assembled enough evidence together and presented it to a federal judge and convinced that judge that there is probable cause to believe that John Bolton's residence contains some evidence of a crime.

Now, we don't know what that evidence is. We don't know what the crime is alleged to be. We don't have any of those facts at this point.

But agents, you can't just go in and say to the judge, hey, I think that this guy has some classified documents around his house because he used to have an important job. That's not going to get you there. Typically, what you want for probable cause to enter a home is you want to be able to cite the testimony of a eyewitness, somebody who's already been in the home and has seen documents or who has spoken to the person and has reason to believe that they have documents.

Or in the case of many national security cases where people who are in government are thought to be taking improperly materials home, something like that.

[08:05:00]

Those people are usually surveilled to assemble that sort of evidence to where people who are in government are thought to be taking improperly materials home, something like that. Those people are usually surveilled to assemble that sort of evidence to build towards a search warrant.

So agents had to have some evidence here. We just don't know what that is at this point.

BOLDUAN: Do we still have Katelyn Polantz, guys? Katelyn, sorry, Katelyn, lots of moving parts as always. Do we know if this search of John Bolton's home has concluded?

POLANTZ: The reporting that we have right now is that the FBI conducted the search, so it could take some time. Sometimes these these searches do take some time because the FBI collects documents, information, especially in a national security probe. And John and Kate, we do not know, again, what this would be about, what the probable cause would be that the court authorized this search for the FBI.

We reached out to the FBI. They do not have a comment at this time about what is going on here. But these sorts of things, these sorts of inquiries, national security inquiries like this, where there is a search, it does often have to do with the handling of classified material.

That was the issue central to John Bolton's book publication and the inquiry at that time. And, you know, there is a question here of are they looking for some sort of records at his home that would support some sort of criminal inquiry that the Justice Department is mounting? But but do not forget that not only is John Bolton somebody who has been around classified information and national security information for a very long time, he's also someone that Donald Trump as president has very, very publicly condemned and gone against.

This is not a friend of the president anymore, even though he served in that first administration.

BERMAN: And we're waiting to hear from the White House itself on this. We'll try to get comment from them as soon as we can.

Meghan Hays, I'm old enough to remember when John Bolton was one of the attorneys on Bush versus Gore, who was down in Florida --

BOLDUAN: Wow, you are old.

BERMAN: -- trying to dig up documents.

That does make me old. I'm old enough to remember when he was seen as a pariah by the left. He still is extraordinarily critical of Democrats any chances he gets.

BOLDUAN: Right.

BERMAN: I mean, in the last election, he said he wasn't going to vote for President Trump, but he flat out refused to vote for the Democrat in the race. That that's where he is politically. But where do you -- what do you see when you look at this this morning? What questions do you have?

MEGHAN HAYS, FORMER BIDEN WHITE HOUSE DIRECTOR OF MESSAGE PLANNING: I mean, without knowing what this search is for, it seems like it's a very petty act by President Trump. It looks like it's just more revenge and more retribution on his political enemies. It's unfortunate to continue to weaponize the DOJ and weaponize the FBI.

I mean, they have other things I'm sure that they could be doing besides raiding his house or, you know, executing this search warrant. So to me, it just seems extremely political, extremely petty and just a really poor use of the resources of the DOJ and the FBI.

BOLDUAN: It was just -- our team was just pulling up, David, some of the -- just some of what Bolton said in his book. I know that that obviously was a source of something of an investigation. No criminal charges were ever brought in an investigation of misuse of classified information.

But it is just in the foreword of Bolton's book, he writes, Trump is unfit to be president.

I mean, that's just in the foreword of his book. He goes on to say he cares almost exclusively about his own interests. Bolton writes, suggesting that Trump would want to be surrounded by a White House of serfs to execute his orders unquestioning, unquestioningly. And then he writes, it is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping, who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.

Just some of the criticisms that we heard from Bolton.

I mean, what do you want? What is going to come of this? I mean, yes, we have to know what -- we do not know what comes of this search and the true basis of why the FBI was authorized to go in to search his home.

But it no matter what, I can promise you, as we are all old enough to see just what where, you know, what happened in the last week, that this is going to become political. And what is it going to do?

URBAN: Yes, well, listen, I mean, you've heard from Andrew and Katelyn that there is -- there has to be some showing of probable cause to a federal judge. This just isn't Donald Trump's or Cash Patel's anger, vitriol coming to coming to roost here. There are line FBI agents, career prosecutors, career people in the Department of Justice who assembled a case file that had to go to a federal judge, presumably who doesn't take any of these things lightly and show a probable cause, more likely than not, that there was evidence of a crime of some sort contained in John Bolton's house.

[08:10:00]

So while this, you know, John Berman said earlier, this has a really bad look to it. You know, this has probably been going on now for quite some time. This isn't pulled together in a few hours. This investigation is most likely been going on for quite some time to get to this point.

The timing is optically it looks political because of you just had you said, you know, John Berman -- John Berman alluded to it, that, you know, Bolton was on criticizing the president heavily. He's been a big detractor of Donald Trump. Has said a lot of not nice things about Donald Trump, but that does not still underlie the fact that there may be some there, there and that some a federal judge someplace found that there's more likely than not something here in this house that contains evidence of a crime.

BERMAN: And just to be fair, all I said is the questions will be asked about the timing because of when this is taking place in the back and forth.

URBAN: I know, absolutely, John, yes.

BERMAN: You know, and I just also look, Andy, Andy McCabe, FBI Director Kash Patel, the director of the FBI this morning tweeted, no one is above the law. FBI agents on mission.

Now, I guess that was tweeted without context. But the context, the bigger context is it happened while FBI officers were, you know, conducting a court ordered search -- court authorized search on John Bolton's home.

So, A, what do you think about the FBI director tweeting that out as this is happening?

And B, what do you think we are likely to hear over the course of the day in terms of an explanation of this? Will they come out and say anything about what's going on here?

MCCABE: Well, they shouldn't. You know, search warrants are typically sealed and only unsealed and therefore accessible to the public after the person who is the subject of the warrant has been charged with a crime and indicted and is then going to trial. So that's much further down the road.

We don't even know if we'll ever get to that point with this investigation. There's certainly many investigations that include search warrants that don't ultimately end in prosecutions. And so we never hear about those. Now, the one notable exception here, John, is, of course, the warrant to search the residence at Mar-a-Lago for allegedly mishandling many, many, as we now know, hundreds of classified documents. That warrant was the affidavit DOJ made in motion very quickly in the two or three days after the execution of the warrant, went back to the court and said, please unseal the affidavit we'd like to share with the public because the president had attacked DOJ so publicly over the propriety of the warrant. So DOJ felt like they had to release that so people would understand that there was true, good, hard evidence to justify taking that step.

Would that happen in this case? Really impossible to say at this point. But standard procedure is we will not know what the evidence was to obtain this warrant or what evidence they may have recovered at the scene, if any, until much further down the line.

So I should say with respect to the director's social media posting, I mean, it's yet another example of, in my opinion, Kash Patel failing to live up to the example of his predecessors. This is not the kind of thing that any FBI director has ever done. FBI directors don't gratuitously point towards search warrants and the people who are the targets of those warrants in any sort of way that could possibly be interpreted as grandstanding and nonsensical, as this one certainly suggests.

I'd also point out that Kash Patel's agents are out on mission every day, all over this country, all over the world, in fact, doing the FBI's work. You don't see him posting quite as often about that. So I think the implication here is pretty clear.

He wanted to draw attention to this law enforcement, this sensitive law enforcement activity at John Bolton's house, which anytime you draw press attention to a to a search warrant execution, you are elevating the risk that is posed to both the agents and the occupants at that place. So it's a pretty irresponsible thing to do.

BERMAN: Andy, thank you.

BOLDUAN: Andy, thank you so much. Let's get to the White House right now. Betsy Klein is standing by.

Betsy, have you heard anything from them about this yet?

BETSY KLEIN, CNN SENIOR REPORTER AND WRITER: No, of course, we've been asking the White House, asking our sources, waiting and checking Truth Social to see if the president weighs in on any of this. But so far, the only reaction is that very oblique tweet that we saw from the FBI director Kash Patel.

[08:15:00]

But I just want to zoom out for a moment and really underscore the deep and lengthy tensions between President Trump and John Bolton, who, of course, was his third national security adviser during his first term. And Bolton has really emerged as one of the major critics of the Trump administration's foreign policy, speaking from a conservative Republican hawkish perspective over the last several years, including immediately after he left the Trump administration. And he had also been quite critical of the president heading into that Alaska summit last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including something that caught the president's attention.

He went after Bolton just a couple of days ago heading into that summit, calling him, quote, a fired loser, a really dumb person, who for saying, as Bolton said, that, quote, Putin has already won.

And Bolton appeared on CNN shortly after the two leaders met and was really critical of how the president handled that meeting with President Putin.

He said, quote, Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won.

Bolton also said, I thought Trump looked very tired up there, not disappointed, but tired.

Certainly something that would catch the president's attention as well.

But Bolton was abruptly fired in 2019. Officials at the time said that his policies and priorities were not in line -- in line with the president's, including the president's positions on Russia and Iran.

He published a book in June of 2020, shortly before the presidential election, that really went after the president's foreign policy decision-making. It alleged that Trump had requested Chinese and Ukrainian help to win the 2020 election. He said that the president had argued that Venezuela was part of the United States.

He said that the president had offered to intervene in the criminal justice system to benefit other world leaders. He also described White House decision-making as a quote, food fight.

But the president, shortly after taking office, went after Bolton, yanking his protective detail in the hours after returning to the White House, something that officials said was an early move aimed at retribution.

We have not, again, heard from the president at this stage. We do expect him to speak in the Oval Office at 12 p.m. We'll be watching that quite closely and any other reaction in the meantime.

BERMAN: All right, great to have you there. Betsy Klein, please keep us posted.

We want to get right back to CNN's Katelyn Polantz, who I believe has some new information -- Katelyn.

POLANTZ: One of the things that we are seeing now is members of the top echelon of the FBI talking publicly. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, on Twitter saying no one is above the law, FBI agents are on a mission. The director or co-deputy director saying public corruption will not be tolerated.

One thing to remember here, putting this into context, is three years ago, almost to the day when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's home, when he was out of the presidency for the existence of classified records there, that also was a national security investigation. No one knew the FBI was at that property until the search was nearly concluded and it had gone on for hours. The FBI was very, very -- they did it in a way so that the FBI wasn't able to be seen and publicly identified. Those officers were not in vests saying FBI.

This, a much different scenario for the former national security advisor, a very prominent national security person, former government official here with John Bolton. The FBI clearly at the scene blocking traffic, having those officers going into the house.

From what I understand, there's a number of media outlets there now. It is still quite early in the day, so a search like this could take some time.

Bolton, he was not home at the time of this and we don't have any more information from him or his lawyer yet on what this could be, but a national security investigation potentially around handling of classified material, that is often what a national security investigation is.

That is something that almost always is under the radar through grand jury, more significant grand jury activity than this and to have the FBI director out there tweeting about this or posting on the social media platform X, not saying his name, but saying that there is FBI agents on a mission and then also the department saying public corruption will not be tolerated and not commenting further. It is a stark dismissal from what -- a stark divergence from what we have seen before in investigations around national security and top political officials.

BERMAN: Very different. All right, Katelyn Polantz, keep us posted.

Kate, I do understand we did see a tweet from John Bolton this morning about the time this all would have happened.

[08:20:00]

BOLDUAN: Yes, I mean this says it was 47 minutes ago, so about the time this would definitely be happening and this is what Bolton put out.

Russia has not changed its goal, drag Ukraine into a new Russian Empire. Moscow has demanded that Ukraine's seed territory it already holds and the remainder of Donetsk, which it has been unable to conquer. Zelenskyy will never do so. Meanwhile, meetings will continue because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but I don't see these talks making any progress.

BERMAN: The kind of thing that has infuriated President Trump over the last several weeks, really going back years now. Again, our breaking news coverage continues. A court-authorized FBI

search of the home of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, getting new information as quickly as we can.

Stay with us.

[08:25:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: All right, we're following the breaking news. A court- authorized FBI search of the former National Security Advisor John Bolton's home. You see right here, these are live pictures from outside of his home. We've seen roads blocked off, police kind of barricading roads so you can't pass through, but now we have a camera on the ground.

This is outside of his home, activities still happening there, as you can see.

BERMAN: With us here in studio, CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson. As you look at this, Joey, and again, this is a court-authorized FBI search of John Bolton's home. What do you see here? What questions do you have?

JOEY JACKSON, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I have a number of questions. Yes, it's court-authorized, but what court? What was the information underlying the search warrant? Look, we understand that a search warrant doesn't mean you're guilty.

Search warrant means two things. One, there's reasonable cause to believe that a crime was committed, and the subject of the warrant may have, may have committed it. And that certainly gives you the ability to go and to do your job, which is to look for information that would further the investigation, to further a narrative that there was a crime.

But what I want to know is how did all of this come about? How long was the investigation going on? If I'm called in terms of representing him, the first issue is certainly he's not going to speak about this. He's a public person. He speaks about a lot, but I'm going to go on the defensive immediately. This is a person, Kate mentioned it, that had a security clearance pulled. He had his security detail pulled.

He's adverse to the president. What world are we living in now? Again, John, best case scenario, this is the DOJ, Department of Justice, doing their job.

We have, as the United States, right, a responsibility to protect national security information, to ensure that everyone follows the rules. Well, it used to be that way, but in any event, and in the event that that's the case, there's a place for the FBI. There's a place for a grand jury, and they should do an investigation. That's best case, John.

Worst case scenario, this is political retribution, and I'm going, if I'm his attorney in front of the cameras, and I'm going to say so. Everybody who criticizes the president because you do it publicly, he's going to tweet about it, and then you're going to get your house raided.

What does that say to everybody else? If you speak against me, I'm coming to your home. If you speak against me, you may end up in jail.

If you speak against me, you're going to incur millions of dollars in legal fees, so keep your mouth shut. If you're a university and you teach things I don't like, I'm going to take your funding.

This is, worst case scenario, bizarro world that we're entering into, and it's very concerning from a legal perspective and practical.

BERMAN: Again, I think it's important to raise these questions, but as you say, given that we just don't know, look, best case scenario, when I say best, not for John Bolton, but that there is something that has been an investigation for a period of time that federal officers met each legal standard before they went into the House, and they have reason to believe a law was broken here or probable cause. Again, we need to find out much more if we can on this.

BOLDUAN: Joey, stay with us, because we also have joining us right now is Juliette Kayyem, CNN senior national security analyst for much more on this. Juliette, again, as John was saying, and it is important to say, it's early on, we don't -- there's so much more not known than known about the circumstance, other than that it is important and it is unfolding as we speak.

What do you see here? What questions do you have?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, what Joey said in terms of the legal standards and what we're dealing with, we have no idea what the nature of the issue is and legitimacy of the issue. But we would be naive to not look at the circumstances in which the Department of Justice under Donald Trump has focused its efforts against what -- who he perceives as his political enemies. This is just the nature of what Donald Trump is doing. We know this with investigations of, say, Senator Adam Schiff.

We know this with an investigation of a governor of the Fed that was started this week. So there's nothing wrong with admitting that these are the atmosphere. John Bolton used to be the national security advisor for Trump.

He has, I want to remind everyone, significant death threats against him from the Iranians. This is well known and well documented. He has had security details.

I will admit I did a speech with him about a year ago. I had never seen -- or a year and a half ago, I'd never seen such a security detail around essentially a private citizen that was based on the nature of the threats against him. Those were pulled when Trump came in, and so he is someone who has been the focus of potential death threats as well as they are of this administration.