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Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro tore into John Bolton for “profiteering off America’s secrets” on Tuesday after the FBI raided his home last week in a reported classified document probe.
“I served with Bolton, and he was far too frequently a loose cannon, bent on bombings and coups — Doctor Strangelove with a mustache,” Navarro, who also advised Trump on trade during his first term, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill.
“He agitated for airstrikes, pushed regime-change fantasies, and obsessed over military solutions when diplomacy was working. Then, instead of honoring executive privilege and confidential debate, Bolton acknowledged that in writing his memoir he relied on the ‘copious notes’ he had conspicuously taken inside the White House.”
Bolton published a book in 2020, The Room Where it Happened, reportedly receiving a $2 million advance for a tell-all of his time in the Trump administration. He served as Trump’s national security advisor starting in 2018 but fell out with the president and left the position in 2019.
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Navarro accused Bolton of “sharing information about Oval Office conversations and national security that should have stayed secret — either by law or under executive privilege.”
“That isn’t service. That isn’t patriotism. That’s profiteering off of America’s secrets.”
Navarro noted that Bolton had described confidential U.S. deliberations on how to fracture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s control and prompt military defections.
“That kind of blueprint isn’t something you hand to the public — or to Maduro’s intelligence services.”
He noted that disclosing national defense information without authorization could violate U.S. code.
“If evidence is found and indictments made, Bolton may one day go to prison for shredding that Constitution, defying executive privilege, and trampling safeguards meant to protect America’s security,” Navarro said. “If that happens, Bolton won’t be remembered for his book tour. He’ll be remembered for the sequel he writes in prison.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to a spokesperson for Bolton for comment.
DEMOCRATS OPPOSED JOHN BOLTON FOR YEARS — UNTIL THEY SOUGHT HIM AS AN ALLY AGAINST TRUMP
Navarro spent four months in prison last year after being convicted of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.
The FBI executed a search warrant on Bolton’s home and office on Friday.
Democrats have also fumed about Bolton’s book: when the former national security advisor refused to serve as their star witness during the first Trump impeachment related to Ukraine, they accused him of saving the juicy details for his memoir.
In June 2020, Judge Royce Lamberth found Bolton had “likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”
He’d submitted the 500-page manuscript for a national security review, but when the review wasn’t completed in four months, he “pulled the plug on the process and sent the still-under-review manuscript to the publisher for printing,” according to the judge.
Lamberth allowed the book to hit the shelves because “the horse is already out of the barn” – the book’s excerpts had already been leaked and 200,000 copies had been shipped.
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