Donald Trump’s former foreign policy advisor, one of the US president’s most visible critics, was charged this Thursday with , according to US media reports. He is the third enemy of the Republican against whom charges have been filed in three weeks, since the president ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, on social networks, to force the charges of those who he thinks have harmed him in his political career.
In an immediate reaction from the Oval Office, Trump has limited himself to describing his former advisor as “a bad person,” without evaluating the charges against him. After his first term, the president was also charged with improper possession of classified documents, although the case never went to court: special prosecutor Jack Smith canceled it after the Republican won the elections again.
As part of the investigation against Bolton, the FBI had searched at the end of August the home and office of the former White House National Security Advisor, converted into a commentator and one of the most ubiquitous critics of the American president in the media.
Bolton was ambassador to the UN during George W. Bush’s term (2001-2009) before becoming the third National Security Advisor of Trump’s first term. At that stage he frequently clashed with the president over how to proceed on a range of geopolitical issues. From North Korea, with whose leader, the autocrat Kim Jong-un, Trump wanted to meet — he did so three times — to Afghanistan and Iraq.
The then advisor published a memoir in 2019, The Room Where It Happened (The Room Where It Happened), about his time in the West Wing of the White House. The presidential office tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the volume from going to press, claiming that it contained .
Since his return to power, Trump has taken a series of steps against those he considers have harmed him as president in his first term or as a candidate for his second. In September, after his extraordinary message to his Secretary of Justice, Pam Bondi, former FBI director James Comey was charged, whom the president blames for the investigation into contacts between Russian representatives and his campaign in the 2016 elections. Comey has been accused of obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.
Last week, New York prosecutor Letitia James was charged with alleged mortgage fraud, opening a civil case against her for fraud in her family business. A Manhattan judge sentenced the president and his family to pay $454 million in fines, in a ruling that limited the Trump Organization’s ability to obtain loans and blocked the Republican’s eldest sons, Eric and Donald Junior, from running the family business for two years. But in August an appeals court overturned that judicial decision.
On the same day of his inauguration to begin his second term, on January 20, Trump signed an order to withdraw the security credentials of nearly 50 former senior officials of his Administration, including Bolton. The president also ordered the removal of the escort of his former advisor, who has received death threats from Iran.
