Kash Patel posts cryptic message amid Bolton raid

FBI Director Kash Patel posted a cryptic message Friday morning amid reports that federal agents were conducting a raid at the home of John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser.

“NO ONE is above the law…@FBI agents on mission,” Patel wrote on the social platform X shortly after 7 a.m. EDT, without mentioning anyone by name.

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino shared Patel’s comment in a separate post, adding, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”

Vice President Vance also reshared the FBI chief’s post.

The agency declined to comment to The Hill on the meaning of the posts.

An FBI official and another source familiar with the matter confirmed to NewsNation, The Hill’s sister network, that agents conducted a search Friday morning at Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., near Washington, D.C.

The search is related to classified information, sources told NewsNation and other outlets.

Bolton, who served in Trump’s first administration, has been a vocal critic of the president’s foreign policy, particularly his handling of the Russia-Ukraine war. In his own post Friday morning around the time of the reported FBI raid, Bolton posted on X to further criticize the administration.

He argued that talks involving Russia and Ukraine aimed at ending the war are unlikely to make progress, given Moscow’s demands for Ukraine to cede territory have been rejected by Kyiv, but said “meetings will continue because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize.”

Trump and Bolton have long clashed, with the president nixing the former adviser’s security clearance after returning to office in January and pulling his security detail, despite threats against Bolton from Iran over his hawkish foreign policy positions.

Meanwhile, Patel’s post Friday morning drew flak from critics.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has criticized the bureau’s leadership under the Trump administration, called the post “yet another example of, in my opinion, Kash Patel failing to live up to the example of his predecessors.”

“This is not the kind of thing that any FBI director has ever done,” McCabe said on CNN, where he is an analyst. “FBI directors don’t gratuitously point toward search warrants and the people who are targets of those warrants.”

Former Trump campaign senior adviser David Urban, who also serves as a commentator on the network, acknowledged the FBI raid “has a really bad look to it” and the timing “looks political” given Bolton’s vocal criticism of Trump, but maintained “there may be some there there.”

Rebecca Beitsch contributed.