Fox contributor Andy McCarthy suggests FBI's Bolton raid is “lawfare”
McCarthy: “A big part of lawfare is to harass people with investigations”
Published
Citation
From the August 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
ANDREW MCCARTHY (FOX CONTRIBUTOR): Well, you know, look, this is a very sad development. It's one we've seen again and again, but this is an ancient feud. It's all, I think, over Bolton's book. Bolton went on a jihad against Trump after he got fired. There was a major controversy over whether he had included classified information in the book, whether he had mishandled notes that he took at meetings, and stuff that ended up in his memoir, which was very lengthy and had a lot of quotations, which must have been difficult to include from memory. So that was kind of what fed into this.
But after all of the back and forth, there was civil litigation, there was a judge, Judge Royce Lamberth, who criticized Bolton for being edgy in the book, risking the possibility of compromising methods and sources of information and opening himself up to civil and criminal litigation. The Biden administration dropped the criminal case, and both sides decided to drop the civil litigation. But it's obviously being revived.
DANA PERINO (CO-ANCHOR): So Andy, what are the next steps here? We're looking at live photographs now. You have the FBI outside of John Bolton's home. That started, we got the news around 7 A.M., it seems to be that's when they went. Those folks there seem to be empty-handed as they walk out. This would have had to have been approved by a judge, if we have that correct. And if so, what could be the next steps here? Do you expect that John Bolton might be charged?
MCCARTHY: I kind of doubt that he'll be charged, Dana, only because, again, this is ancient history. Now, it's probably dumb on my part to speculate here, because until you see what they have actually taken out of his home, and, you know, if they hit a home run and they find something that looks like it's at least within the ballpark of being classified, then you don't have a statute of limitations problem or all the other stuff that you usually have to worry about with ancient history. So we'll just have to see.
But I must say, I think that we saw with President Trump, I was hoping that his administration wouldn't practice the things that were practiced on him. But a big part of lawfare is to harass people with investigations. So, even if there are never any charges, there's going to be — there's already been a search warrant, there's obviously a criminal investigation that's underway, there will probably be a grand jury component of it, and even if there is no charges, this will be a very big deal for Bolton personally in the coming months and maybe even years.