WASHINGTON — One of Donald Trump’s top White House advisers in his first term warned Thursday that the former and soon-to-be president’s threats against onetime congresswoman Liz Cheney and others who tried to hold him accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, need to be taken seriously.
“This is part of the retribution campaign that he signalled for quite some time,” said John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from spring 2018 through late summer 2019. “The important thing is that people understand that he’s carrying through on what he said he was going to do.”
Cheney, of Wyoming, was the highest-ranking congressional Republican to continue criticising Trump for his coup attempt culminating in an attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters nearly four years ago. She lost her leadership position in May 2021, but then served as vice chair of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack. A Trump-backed Republican ousted her from her House seat in the 2022 midterm elections.
Trump has at times claimed that he would fulfil his many promises of seeking “retribution” against his political opponents simply by completing a successful second term. On Wednesday, however, he offered what appeared to be a new threat targeting Cheney — “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble” — and then paraphrased a House ally who’d said that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney … and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“My message to Republicans is that you have to take what Trump says on repeated occasions seriously. That’s what he wants to do,” Bolton told HuffPost. “He may not do it. He may be distracted from it, but don’t live in the bubble that it’s just talk and you can dismiss it.”
Bolton also said that Trump’s pick to be the next director of national intelligence, former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, should be rejected. “She’s utterly unqualified for the job, and she said things about Syria, about Ukraine, about a variety of other issues that put her not just at the extremes of public opinion, but put her on a different planet,” he said.
Trump aides did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Bolton was Trump’s third national security adviser. His first, Michael Flynn, resigned just weeks after the start of Trump’s term in 2017 after admitting he misled then-Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the US during the presidential transition. Trump’s second national security adviser, HR McMaster, lasted just over a year.
Bolton, considered a foreign policy hawk in the tradition of the pre-Trump Republican Party, frequently butted heads with Trump over a number of issues, including his affinity for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Bolton left the White House just as the public was learning of Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine into smearing the 2020 Democratic opponent he most feared.
Bolton said he considered Gabbard; former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first choice for attorney general; and Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to run the FBI, to be the most dangerous for the country. Gaetz was pressured into withdrawing his name last month amid speculation regarding a still-secret House Ethics Committee report about his alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.
“That’s one down,” Bolton said.
Whether Senate Republicans have any interest in warnings from the likes of Bolton, however, remains to be seen. An account on X, formerly Twitter, for Senate Republican leadership consistently posts supportive messages about GOP senators’ meetings with Trump’s administration picks, including Patel and Gabbard, but never posts statements from Republican senators who are noncommittal.
“I had a good meeting with @Kash_Patel this afternoon,” read a Wednesday message that the account reposted from Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, referring to Patel. “We talked about how we can support our great FBI Agents in the field and strengthen the ties between federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement.”
That post came shortly after one from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul praising Gabbard. “Tulsi embodies the qualities Washington finds intolerable: fearlessness, principle, and an unwavering commitment to challenging corruption,” Paul wrote.
Bolton is among the 60 former and current executive branch officials from both major political parties whom Patel listed in his book, “Government Gangsters,” and believes need to be gone after.
Patel served under Bolton as a National Security Council staffer during Trump’s first term, and Bolton criticised him in a book of his own, called The Room Where It Happened, for having spent much of his time there trying to cozy up to Trump rather than carry out his assigned duties.
Bolton said that if, as the coup-attempting former president and his Republican allies claim, the FBI does need to be fixed, the way to do so is to appoint an outsider with a strong reputation, such as Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s choice of William Webster, a federal judge, in 1978.
“You don’t solve the problem by making it worse and appointing an FBI director who’s going to conduct witch hunts because Donald Trump wants it,” he said.
