The FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s house has been greeted with horror by the same people who reveled in the Bureau’s search of Melania Trump’s underwear drawer. As we noted here, the search, which was signed off on by two federal judges, could have related to several possible scenarios involving mishandling of classified information, including a report that Bolton sent classified documents to family members:
Today’s New York Times has more, apparently based on leaks from inside the administration:
The United States gathered data from an adversarial country’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case that remains open.
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The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”
This has happened more than once before: a foreign adversary’s intelligence service sends communications that include emails from American officials, or summaries of such emails, with commentary by the foreign operative. Our own intelligence services then intercept those communications. A key question is, are the emails that are included or summarized in the adversary’s communications genuine? The raid on Bolton’s house may have been intended to answer that question:
One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.
This case may be similar to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. When foreign policy officials use insecure means to transmit classified information, there is a serious risk that their communications will be intercepted by an adversary’s intelligence service. The Times story lists Iran, Russia and China as possibilities. It seems almost inconceivable that people like Clinton and Bolton would fail to understand the risk involved in insecure email communications, but we know that the risk didn’t stop Clinton, and it may not have stopped Bolton, either.
