George Conway Explains His Unexpected Cameo in the FBI Raid on John Bolton
The ex-husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway live-streamed the search.
Conservative attorney and longtime Trump critic George Conway says his presence outside John Bolton’s home during the FBI’s Friday dawn raid was purely by chance.
Conway, who lives in the same upscale Bethesda, Maryland neighborhood as President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, said Saturday he stumbled on news of the raid online.
“I found out about it basically because [FBI Director] Kash Patel had been talking about it, and people were talking about it on social media,” Conway, who is the ex-husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, told MSNBC’s The Weekend: Primetime.
Bolton returned to his Bethesda, Maryland home Friday following its search by the FBI.
Tasos Katopodis/REUTERS
The Friday morning raid was said to be part of an ongoing federal probe into whether Bolton potentially mishandled classified documents.
George Conway live streams on his phone outside the home of the former White House national security adviser John Bolton as it is searched by FBI members, in Bethesda, Maryland, Aug. 22, 2025.
Tasos Katopodis/Reuters
Living just 10 minutes away, Conway decided to head over. “By the time I got to John Bolton’s house, there was already a crowd of media and neighbors and onlookers there. So, I just found out about it like everyone else. It’s just that I know where he lives because I live around here and I’ve driven my daughters to and from their friend’s house by driving by his house.”
The conservative lawyer stressed that he had no inside knowledge of what investigators were looking for. “We have no idea whether there’s anything in there that is ultimately could provide evidence against John Bolton,” he said.
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“I’m sure that they’re pulling out anything that would be related to his work at the White House. And then they’re going to have to review it to see whether there’s anything in there that would constitute evidence of a crime.”
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago is seen in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 3, 2025.
Carlos Barria/REUTERS
He added that agents were likely gathering materials for later review, comparing it to the search of Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.
That search, executed in 2022, led agents to seize thousands of federal records, including more than 100 marked classified. Trump was indicted in 2023 but the case was dismissed last July after a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.
Explaining the volume of documents taken from Bolton’s home, Conway said: “They don’t have time to read everything at the house.”
“They’re just collecting things that fit possibly the general description, and as what happened at Mar-a-Lago. And then they have to focus in on what materials could possibly be relevant,” he said. “I doubt that John Bolton, being the careful lawyer that he is and the fastidious person that he is, had anything like what Donald Trump had in his basement.”
Bolton didn’t appear to be at home during the raid. A longtime foreign policy hawk, he served as national security adviser from 2018 to 2019 and has often criticized Trump. In an appearance on the Daily Beast podcast on Monday, he blasted Trump as “the world’s worst negotiator.”
Conway’s surprise cameo at the Bolton raid also played out online. On X, he temporarily renamed himself George “Action News” Conway and joked about live-streaming the scene.
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