.jpg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Murdoch-owned paper Trump is suing slams president’s ‘vendetta campaign’ against John Bolton – UK Times")
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board launched a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, characterizing the recent FBI raid on the Maryland home and office of former national security adviser John Bolton as a “vendetta campaign.”
The newspaper’s editorial board described the Friday morning operation as “hard to see … as anything other than vindictive.”
The conservative paper has long rebuked Trump, even when its publisher, a subsidiary of right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his NewsCorp empire, has been on good terms with the president both in and out of office.
That relationship soured significantly after the WSJ published an article concerning an allegedly “bawdy” birthday letter to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump asserts does not exist. The president filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against Murdoch, the paper, its parent company Dow Jones, and the journalists whose bylines appeared on the piece.
On Saturday, in a strongly worded editorial, the board asserted that “it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part of how [Trump] will define success in his second term.”
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Despite the president’s claims of ignorance regarding the raid, the publication highlighted his past criticisms of his former national security adviser and United Nations ambassador from his first term.
The editorial board also noted the immediate termination of Bolton’s protective security detail upon Trump’s return to the White House, despite threats to his life connected to actions against Iran.
“This is the kind of gratuitous viciousness that has increasingly defined Mr. Trump’s return to office,” the board wrote.
The publication also directed sharp criticism at FBI Director Kash Patel, who tweeted that “NO ONE is above the law” just minutes before news of the Bolton raid broke.
“The president’s minions … don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term,” the board wrote.
The raid on Bolton’s property occurred shortly after several recent public appearances analyzing Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin a week ago, with a stated aim of negotiating an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Bolton, a frequent contributor to the WSJ, also recently appeared on The Daily Beast podcast, where he described Trump as “the world’s worst negotiator” and claimed the president struggled to focus on preparing for a 2018 summit with Putin due to watching a soccer game.
During Trump’s meeting with Putin, Bolton said that Trump would surrender Alaska to Russia.
On Friday morning, Bolton wrote about an interview he did with NPR about Russia.
“Russia has not changed its goal: drag Ukraine into a new Russian Empire,” he wrote on X. “Moscow has demanded that Ukraine cede territory it already holds and the remainder of Donetsk, which it has been unable to conquer. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky will never do so. Meanwhile, meetings will continue because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but I don’t see these talks making any progress.”
In a 2024 preface to his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton wrote that Trump was “unfit” to be president and would seek retribution against his political enemies if he returned to office.
The president attempted to block the book’s publication, claiming that Bolton had exposed classified information, despite the book having undergone an extensive pre-publication review at the White House for such material.
Trump, for his part, has regularly and loudly criticized Bolton, calling him “stupid” and saying that he “blew up the Middle East.”
The WSJ’s editorial board had previously warned about Trump and his allies pursuing political revenge, including in December 2024, weeks before his inauguration.
“We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined,” the board wrote.
An affidavit outlining the purpose of the raid that has been filed in federal court remains sealed.
Regarding Trump’s lawsuit targeting the newspaper’s report on an alleged birthday card from the president to the late sex offender, the WSJ’s parent company, Dow Jones, has said in a statement that it maintains “full confidence in the rigor and accuracy” of its reporting.
