Vice-president JD Vance denies FBI investigation is politically motivated. Key US politics stories from Friday 22 August
Donald Trump has said he did not know a raid by the FBI on the home of his former adviser turned critic, John Bolton, was planned and that he expected to be briefed by the justice department on it.
“I tell the group I don’t want to know, but just you have to do what you have to do. I don’t want to know about it,” Trump said, adding “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. He’s a real sort of a lowlife. He’s not a smart guy. But he could be very unpatriotic. I’m going to find out.”
JD Vance denied the raid was politically motivated. “We don’t think that we should throw people – even if they disagree with us politically, maybe especially if they disagree with us politically – you shouldn’t throw people willy-nilly in prison,” the vice-president told NBC. “You should let the law drive these determinations, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Here are the key Trump administration news stories of the day:
The FBI raided Bolton’s home on Friday morning.
The federal search of Bolton’s house in the Washington DC area was as part of an investigation involving the handling of classified documents, the Associated Press reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. A government source confirmed the raid to the Guardian, but did not disclose further details.
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The US Department of Justice has released the transcript and audio recording of an interview conducted by Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, with the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Donald Trump has threatened to take his federal crackdown on crime and city cleanliness to New York and Chicago, as the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered that national guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington DC under federal control will now be armed.
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Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage to Iranian nuclear sites from US strikes angered Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.
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Kilmar Ábrego García has been freed from criminal custody in Tennessee so he can rejoin his family in Maryland while awaiting trial on human smuggling charges, after a court ordered his release.
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Canada will drop its counter-tariffs on some American goods in the coming days, Mark Carney has said, as the country’s prime minister looks to end a protracted trade war with the US.
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The US government has taken an unprecedented 10% stake in Intel under a deal with the struggling chipmaker and is planning more such moves, according to Donald Trump and the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, in the latest extraordinary intervention by the White House in corporate America.
Current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) officials are concerned over a new agency rule requiring disaster victims to have an email address in order to apply for federal aid.
The Trump administration has unilaterally stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts after a federal appeals court overruled an injunction which halted the plans.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 21 August 2025.