As is often the case with legacy newscasts, an item reported with great fanfare becomes discarded once it is no longer useful to a narrative. Such is the case with details of what was seized during last week’s raid of John Bolton’s home.
NBC Nightly News was the ONLY legacy nightly newscast to report on these disclosures, and even then only in the tiniest of briefs. Here is that report as aired on Thursday, September 4th, 2025:
TOM LLAMAS: We're back now with new details on the FBI's investigation into whether John Bolton mishandled classified info. A newly unsealed search warrant shows at Bolton's home the FBI seized a phone with several camera lenses, USB drives, computers and a white binder labelled “Statements and Reflections to Allied Strikes.” Bolton is a former Trump national security adviser, and now fierce critic of the president.
That thin brief doesn’t even begin to address what was found at Bolton’s home. More details via The New York Post:
Federal agents seized three computers, two iPhones and reams of documents from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s house during their Aug. 22 raid, according to court records — which also revealed that the 76-year-old could soon face charges that may land him in prison for more than a decade.
The feds raided Bolton’s Bethesda, Md., home and Washington, DC, office as part of an investigation into allegations that he snuck national security files out of the White House during President Trump’s first term by emailing them to family members on a private server, high-ranking FBI officials told The Post at the time.
In addition to the high-tech hardware, agents confiscated two USB drives, a hard drive, four boxes of “printed daily activities,” “typed documents in folders labeled ‘Trump I – IV'” and a white binder labeled “statements and reflections to allied strikes,” according to an inventory made public Thursday.
NBC’s choice to run their Bolton item in the next-to-last segment of the Nightly News, in the briefs segment, is a telling editorial choice. Initial news of the raid ran at or near the top of the newscast, but this clearly wasn’t the case today.
And yet this teeny, tiny brief on NBC was the only reporting on the matter on the legacy nightly news. Both CBS and ABC chose to omit the story entirely. ABC’s World News Tonight ran an item on the Powerball jackpot rolling over to $1.7 billion. The CBS Evening News ran an item on tattoos. Tattoos.
The suppression of this story is proof evident that if it weren’t for double standards, there would be none at all.
