Vice President JD Vance appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press after the home and office of President Donald Trump‘s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has become a fierce critic of the President, was searched by the FBI on Friday.
Vance said: “We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton … if we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course eventually prosecutions will come … there’s a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.”
[Bolton also served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the second George W. Bush administration.]
“We”??
JD Vance (and the WH) are clearly involved in — and likely directing — the DOJ investigation of Trump nemesis John Bolton.
Why are there no congressional Republicans willing to speak up against this corrupt use of the criminal justice system to go after Trump’s enemies? https://t.co/sGLg9KTasc
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) August 22, 2025
Another vocal Trump critic, U.S. Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY), responded to the Vance interview: “‘We’?? JD Vance (and the WH) are clearly involved in — and likely directing — the DOJ investigation of Trump nemesis John Bolton. Why are there no congressional Republicans willing to speak up against this corrupt use of the criminal justice system to go after Trump’s enemies?”
MAGA supporters are criticizing Goldman for being a “hypocrite” and point to his lack of commensurate concern over the 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where more than 13,000 government documents were recovered.
(In 2023, Trump was indicted on federal charges related to the documents; the case was abandoned after Trump won the 2024 election.)
Some Trump/Vance supporters are also defending Vance’s use of the word “we” by writing comments including, “We as in the United States of America.”
Trump’s first-term DOJ national security specialist John Demers called for a criminal investigation after Trump filed a civil suit against Bolton, and in 2020 empaneled a grand jury to charge Bolton with disclosing secrets in a now nearly five-year-old book which the Trump administration sought to stop from being published. The Biden DOJ ended the investigation in June 2021.
The Washington Post editorial board today responded to the Bolton investigation with an op-ed titled, ‘FBI Raid Targeting Bolton Crosses a Line in the Trump Revenge Campaign,’ with the subtitle, “This case underscores the danger of putting partisan hacks in top law enforcement jobs.”