Vice President JD Vance slipped up in a recent interview, and that one word could cause serious legal trouble for Donald Trump.
On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Vance talked about the FBI raid on John Bolton’s home. Bolton, Trump’s former security advisor turned fierce critic, was under investigation. Trump then threatened to target another critic, ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
When asked if Bolton was “being targeted because he’s a critic of Trump,” Vance said, “Not at all.”
Then he added:
“If we were trying to do that, we would just throw out prosecutions willy-nilly like the Biden administration (Justice Department) did. … We haven’t (brought a case against Bolton) yet, the Department of Justice has not done that yet. We’re investigating Ambassador Bolton, but if they ultimately bring a case, it will be because they determine that he has broken the law. We’re going to be careful about that, we’re going to be deliberate about that.”
That one word—“we”—caught the eye of CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere right away.
“It’s an important word that the vice president kept using in that clip, which is ‘we,’” Dovere said. “He says ‘we’re’ doing this investigation, ‘we’re’ going after it; not the FBI, not the Justice Department, he is very clearly saying this is coming from the White House. The ‘we’ there is not separate.”
In other words, Vance openly admitted that the White House itself is involved in these investigations, not just independent agencies. This could blow open claims that these legal actions are politically motivated and controlled directly by Trump’s team.
CNN host Audie Cornish warned, “That could be a legal point to make later on.”
New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro hammered the point further:
“Yeah, except just in the last 24 hours, President Trump started on Truth Social going after Chris Christie, another former ally of President Trump is a major critic. The president hates to be criticized on television. Second of all, he really hates people who were former allies and have turned against him; that, to him, is a very, very sore spot.”
JD Vance’s “we” wasn’t just a slip of the tongue—it might be the key that opens a new legal battle over whether Trump is weaponizing the Justice Department against his critics.
Watch the clip below via CNN:
