Trump told me a trick from his business days. He’s using it to destroy good men

If you’re reading this, there’s an excellent chance that, were Donald Trump’s investigators looking at you, they would eventually find something. Did you ever download a song you didn’t pay for on a music streaming site? Forget to declare a gift when you crossed the border at customs? Round up a deduction at tax time? Somewhere, there’s likely to be a thread (however thin) that a determined prosecutor could pull to incriminate you. The question might then become whether an apparently vengeful president wants to come after you.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, will plead guilty later this month to one charge of mishandling classified information and pay a fine of $2.25m, leaving to a judge whether he will spend any time in federal custody, sources told US media. The Trump defector has become the first real scalp in what looks like a campaign of revenge.

Bolton may have broken a law, but his diaries are not the scandal. The scandal is whether Trump wanted his Justice Department to find something to make a foe bleed. They did indeed find something: private diary entries that they allege may have contained sensitive information, for possible use in a book he was writing at the time. But none of it is presently alleged to have been actually put in his book. Perhaps not coincidentally, that book was deeply critical of his former boss.

By my count, the Trump administration has threatened or opened federal investigations into more than a dozen people who’ve written books critical of him, myself included.

The Bolton case was something the Biden administration had already investigated and apparently “shelved”, according to officials. Yet Trump’s team became aware of it, apparently resurrected it, and Bolton felt he had to settle.

Vice President JD Vance has denied the FBI raid on Bolton’s home was politically motivated. For his part, Trump said he did not know it was planned and expected to be briefed by the justice department on it. But he added “I’m not a fan of John Bolton” and “he could be very unpatriotic. I’m going to find out”.

The former US ambassador to the UN is expected to plead guilty to a single count — retention of national security information (in his personal diaries) — out of 18 counts the Trump administration brought against him last year. The government is dropping all of the other charges.

By threatening the former national security adviser with prison, Trump’s henchmen have secured a settlement that will please the President. Bolton had the choice to fight a gruelling, expensive, multi-year battle that could risk life in prison if convicted, or cut a bankruptcy-level deal and make it go away with the possibility that a judge will be lenient about time in federal custody.

I read this as the White House wanting to send a message to Trump’s perceived enemies: If you don’t shut up, we’ll find something to make you pay.

Bolton has spent a career advocating policies many people on the political left spent opposing. Inside the first Trump administration, when I helped run the Department of Homeland Security, I agreed with him on a lot and fought with his team on a lot, too. But I also know him to be a good man. A man I believe to have more genuine patriotism and integrity in his pinky finger than Trump has in his whole body.

One of the great ironies in all of this is that I once witnessed Bolton trying to keep Trump from getting himself into legal trouble over the handling of classified secrets. During a meeting with journalists in his first term, Trump picked up a fistful of documents and waved them in the air, bragging about the secretive information he received as President. An aide rushed in to tell Bolton, who reacted swiftly to lock down the situation, making sure Trump hadn’t exposed data to prying cameras that might have exposed operations or been deeply embarrassing to the President.

But the administration did not need to win in court against Bolton. Trump prefers to get his targets to capitulate before that stage. How do I know this? He told me.

The President once confided a lesson that he’d learned in business. “When you threaten to sue somebody, they don’t do anything,” he said, as I listened from the couch in front of the Resolute Desk. “They say ‘Pshhhh!’” — and he waved his hand in the air, theatrically. “And they keep doing what they want. But when you sue them, they go ‘Ooooh!’ and they settle. It’s as easy as that.”

That’s the method. Trump’s team didn’t have to win the Bolton case. They only had to file it, converting the Department of Justice into the law firm he always wished he had, and let the weight of the thing do the rest. The calculus would have been frightening. Either accept the permanent mark of a felony and a multimillion-dollar fine, or roll the dice at trial and risk life in prison — while being forced to air still more of the nation’s secrets in your own defence.

There are two reasons this is a tornado siren for American democracy.

First, it suggests that there are separate tiers of justice in the US. Bolton was accused of keeping “diary-like” entries and documents from his time as national security adviser, that prosecutors say contained national defence information classified up to the top secret level but which Bolton denied, and of transmitting some of these materials to two relatives as he wrote his book (he has only pleaded guilty to holding the diary information, not any classified documents).

In the same period, the current president was accused of carting off some of the most tightly compartmented material this government produces — pages and pages of war plans, nuclear information and more — refusing to return it, and, prosecutors alleged, scheming to hide it from investigators who suspected he meant to exploit it. That case was dismissed. This one ends in a guilty plea. Many see a disparity here.

Second, and even more concerning, Trump will be emboldened. In the wake of this action, I predict he will accelerate the investigations already open and launch new ones, fishing for the stray scrap that lets him charge a critic, betting the target will be forced to fold rather than be ruined.

Look at former FBI director James Comey. They couldn’t make the perjury case stick, so a judge threw it out, and now they are trying to put him in the dock over seashells on a beach. In each case, it seems like the man was selected, a case was assembled and charges were filed. In that order.

When he was first charged, Bolton resurrected an old Soviet saying. Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime. The line is attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the secret-police chief who ran Stalin’s terror in a police state that selected its enemy first and located their offences second. Why does that matter today? If it is happening in the United States of America, in theory, no one is safe.

Beria’s method in the Soviet Union endured for so long because people preferred, out of fear, to believe each prosecution was equal. That comfort was easier than the horror of admitting the system had rotted and that justice might be being doled out selectively and vindictively.

If they admitted that, then they had to face the truth that they might be next. So people looked the other away.

It is clear to me that Donald Trump has weaponised the powers of the government. A man who gave this country nearly 40 years of service will carry the mark of a felon and hand over millions of dollars in fines. Whether you love or loathe John Bolton, or think he is guilty or not, the bell has tolled for the US justice system. You may just not be standing close enough to hear it yet.