🔥MSNBC outside of John Bolton’s Home. “At first I thought WOW THIS WAS RETRIBUTION..and thought wow they said they were gonna do this but then realized if you supported the Mar-A-Lago raid to get documents then you kind of have to support it”
MSNBC Interviewer: Give us your reaction to what we know so far.
Former FBI Special Agent: Yeah, I always go off what my first instinct when I see a story, and this one, it was two-sided. I thought, wow, this is retribution. You know, they’ve said they were going to do that.But then I look at it and say, wait a second. If you supported the Mar-A-Lago raid to try to get classified documents out that were tried to— quietly gotten before—then you kind of have to support it, and the administration or the FBI can reopen investigation. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s intense.
And when you look at the Mar-A-Lago raid, there was a quiet effort to get those documents back and they tried and tried. So I would really, you know, want to understand, was that done here or was this the show? Was this what they said they were going to do so they want to come out and very openly say, this is what we’re doing? You know, it’s been put out on X about not being above the law. I would say that goes to intent, but that’s kind of the norm now.
All the cabinet officials are just going straight to X when that wasn’t done before. So I don’t know if you can separate it by that. But I look at it as someone who’s handled classified information, very highly sensitive stuff every single day, and I was very careful with it. When I was in locations, I would have notebooks that weren’t technically classified but you’re taking notes in a classified environment, and they stayed in that location, and I never brought them home, I never brought them to another location, and then I had to burn them or shred them when I left there and couldn’t bring them back.
And I wouldn’t want to look at—are we talking about documents that are stamped that he had in meetings that were openly classified? Or are they going after notebook—the notes on his book, notebooks that he took into meetings? Because that’s actually a lot harder to prove on the classified side when you take it into court.
Interviewer: So Rob, we now have footage here of Ambassador Bolton’s home. It’s in Bethesda, Maryland, which for those who don’t know the area, suburb just to the north and west of Washington D.C. This looks like perhaps some neighbors or others standing out front of the home right now. So Rob, talk to us about what this would have looked like. You obviously spent years with the FBI. What typically—or walk us through some of the scenarios. You know, this is an early morning raid. We know that the FBI tends to favor that time of day. How could this—what are some options here? How could this have gone down? What would this raid have looked like?
Former FBI Special Agent: You always want to do them early in the morning. There’s a number of reasons, but most likely the person’s asleep and not in a position to really react quickly to—if they’re at the door. Not that you’re going to be able to destroy a lot of documents and stuff, but that’s always the time you look at doing it. The national security ones—I’ve been brought in on raids that no one in the office even knew about. The SWAT team gets called in the middle of the night, we show up, they brief us, and we didn’t even know the investigation was going on, but we’re then there for a search warrant.
And you knock on the door, you have the person come out. And again, the search warrant defines what you’re allowed to look for. And in classified documents, you can actually look a lot because it can be on a thumb drive, so anywhere you can hide a thumb drive, you can search. So all those things are in there, it’s going to lay out what documents you’re looking for, what was the evidence, you know, pointing you to those types of documents. Do they have—it was files, it was notebooks. So they’re going to be looking in his office, but anywhere else where you could technically hide those, you’re going to start looking at. And if they were up on texts or something, you may have information like that, saying where they are hidden or something like that, or emails back and forth that they went up on, emails say with his publisher and he was talking about his book and his notes, that if that’s what they’re looking to go for.
So those raids though you always do in the morning. You try to keep them quiet, but it’s not going to happen. And the same thing—there’s a lot of critical things on the Mar-A-Lago raid, how they did it. It wasn’t the fact that they did it. It was very openly done. But there was a back effort. So again, did they inform him beforehand trying to get these documents? Couldn’t get them, and then just finally did the raid? Or was it something like they had the investigation going, they got enough for a search warrant, and then they did the raid without telling him? Those are—those will, I think, come out later on as they did in the raids that were done before. But again, I support if you really think there’s documents out there. I was kind of surprised if John Bolton had documents, knowing when the administration came in and what they actually said they were going to do, why he didn’t maybe get with somebody in DOJ to get documents that may have been misplaced and in his residence back to the government. Because they did kind of announce they were going to look to do this. And in fact, they did. And I think everyone else that talked about doing this too now really needs to pay attention and maybe go back to DOJ and try to work something out.
