WASHINGTON — Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton should face criminal charges over his alleged emailing of highly sensitive classified materials through a private server, high ranking FBI officials told The Post Saturday, as they questioned why the Biden administration shelved the case in the first place.
Federal agents raided Bolton’s Maryland home and DC office Friday morning in search of evidence in their case investigating the Trump critic’s alleged theft of “highly sensitive national security documents.”
The alleged crime was first identified in 2020 through a “very specific intelligence capacity” that helped produce damning intelligence that Bolton had “transferred” classified documents to his wife and daughter from his White House desk before Trump fired him in September 2019, the senior sources told The Post.
Investigators opened the case — entirely separate from a different investigation into Bolton’s alleged inclusion of national security secrets in his 2020 book, “The Room Where it Happened” — at the time, which carried into the Biden administration, but was “shelved,” officials said.
Now, Trump’s Justice Department is questioning if the Biden FBI’s decision not to further pursue the case against one of the most staunch Trump critics was politically motivated.
“The [Biden administration] had probable cause to know that he had taken material that was detrimental to the national security of the United States, and they made no effort to retrieve it,” a senior FBI official told The Post on Saturday.
Bolton is one of the most prominent ex-Trump officials regularly criticizing his former boss in media appearances, leading some to believe it would have been politically advantageous to allow Bolton to go along unscathed.
“That was a friendly administration to [Bolton.] They kept bashing [Trump] the entire time for ‘weaponizing law enforcement,’ and they — by politically stopping a righteous investigation — are the ones who weaponized law enforcement,” the official alleged.
The case — described as “air-tight” by some investigators — was so buried that FBI Director Kash Patel did not find out about it until about a month after his February confirmation, when he asked agents for a briefing on sensitive cases, the sources said.
Among those addressed was the Bolton case, which the director initially thought had to do with the prior closed investigation into Bolton’s book.
But investigators encouraged him to look closer, explaining it was an entirely new case that they were stopped from pursuing over the past four years by the Biden administration.
The raid Tuesday was launched to find further evidence of the alleged crime.
Federal agents found “a lot” of potential evidence at Bolton’s home, as well as “a bunch” from his DC office, the sources said.
Federal investigators are confident in their case against Bolton, but the Justice Department does not intend to go after his wife and daughter, the sources added.
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