Murdoch paper Trump is suing slams president’s ‘vendetta campaign’ against John Bolton

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.”

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.