The FBI recently raided the home of former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida and former Trump official and well-known neocon, John Bolton, admitted during an interview that Merrick Garland, the head of the Justice Department is getting steamrolled by Trump over the unprecedented raid.
While appearing on CNN’s “New Day,” Bolton said that even though the raid may have been legal, it has been a disaster politically and that the Justice Department is being “overwhelmed” by Trump.
“I think it says there are very significant problems here for President Trump and many of his advisers, post-presidency. But I think we’ve got to distinguish between the legal battle that’s going on and the political battle,” Bolton said.
“I think the Justice Department position sounds perfectly reasonable on the legal battle. But on the political battle, I think they’re being overwhelmed by Donald Trump,” he admitted. “You know, if we were in a Colosseum with two gladiators, one of them Donald Trump, the other Merrick Garland, we’d be about to witness the slaughter of the lambs.”
Bolton then stated that the Department of Justice should be more transparent when handling this investigation, suggesting that the search warrant or the probable cause affidavit be released to the public to regain trust.
“The Justice Department understandably wants to follow its normal procedures. It’s facing an adversary who couldn’t care less about the normal procedures. And I do think the department’s got to do more here,” Bolton said. “I know it’s hard, but they’re still not doing enough to explain why this search warrant was executed and why, why now? They don’t want to release the affidavit.”
“Last night, for example, when they filed their motion, they should have put somebody on camera at the Department of Justice reading from it,” he continued. “They should have tweeted it. They should have sent it to every member of Congress. I’m not asking them to say more than what they’ve said in their court filing, but they’ve got to do more to explain what they’re up to. And they’ve got to think of creative ways to justify it to a very skeptical public, in many respects.”
CNN host John Berman asked, “So you’re saying better PR, but you’re, are you saying that they should release the affidavit, parts of the affidavit, or let members of Congress see some of the classified material?”
“Look, the argument is that you can’t even release a redacted version of the affidavit because most of it would be redacted. I’m not surprised by that,” Bolton said. “I can’t, I don’t know what the documents are. I don’t know what sensitive sources they’ve spoken to. I’m just saying that you’ve got to be more realistic about the political environment that they’re operating under.”
“And I would say this, I think this is something, if President Biden thinks that this is a legitimate investigation, he needs to say something. Other politicians need to weigh in. Otherwise, to pick a Watergate metaphor, right now, the Department of Justice is twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. It is a target for Donald Trump, and it’s not being defended,” he concluded.
The DOJ admitted on Monday that they had in fact, acted outside of the scope of the search warrant they had when they seized the passports of Trump – which has now been returned to him.
