Two names stand out as particularly newsworthy among those being mentioned, at least to us, as possible National Security Adviser following the departure of John Bolton. One is our envoy to Free Germany, Ambassador Richard Grenell, who, we hear, is due to speak with the President late this week. The other is — wait for it — General Michael Flynn, who had the NSC job for a month at the start of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

We caution our readers that these names reached us only as Washington scuttlebutt. Even as such, though, they may prove to be a window into the jousting ahead for a post that does not require Senate confirmation. General Flynn’s name is particularly startling, given that he’s a felon awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to misleading the FBI over his contacts with Russia’s former envoy here.

Whether that guilty plea will survive, though, has been in doubt for some time. Just today General Flynn’s lawyers accused the prosecutors — that is, Special Counsel Mueller’s team — of “egregious government misconduct” in withholding exculpatory evidence that due process required them to disclose to the defense. The New York Sun nine months ago called on the Judge, Emmet Sullivan, to reject the general’s guilty plea.

Sentencing on that guilty plea is now set, at least tentatively, for December 18. It looks, though, as if it is going to be far from a routine hearing. At a hearing today, the general’s lawyers made clear that they want their accusations against the prosecutors to be heard, as they should be, and the judge indicated he would do so. Our impression is that the judge gets the issue that underlies this case.

In any event, it would be a radical step for Mr. Trump to bring back the general to run the NSC. Then again, too, Mr. Trump has been nursing a no-so-quiet fury at the way the so-called deep state has attempted to submarine his administration from the outset. Restoring General Flynn, who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the NSC would be a step in vindicating those who were sabotaged.

Ambassador Grenell doesn’t present these kinds of issues. He has had a wonderful career. We first met him, and came to admire him, when he was spokesman for our mission at the United Nations. He spoke for the mission there for something like eight years. He, too, though would be something of a radical pick, recommended by the forthrightness with which he has represented Mr. Trump and America in Germany.

Given Mr. Trump’s challenges to the Europeans, after all, Mr. Grenell’s assignment has been one of the most daunting faced by an American envoy in Bonn or Berlin. He’s handled the assignment in an honest and unabashed way, and it wouldn’t be a bad moment to give him a promotion. His eight years at the United Nations mission certainly gave him a worldwide education.

Which brings us back to Mr. Bolton. We’re sorry to see him leave the administration. We don’t know him well. We’ve covered him, though, since the 1970s, when President George H.W. Bush assigned him to lead the campaign to get the United Nations to repeal its resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.” The General Assembly had passed that measure in 1975 on a vote of 72 to 35 (32 abstained).

Mr. Bolton brought to the repeal effort a righteous zeal, animated by American interests and a revulsion at the bigotry the resolution disclosed. In the event, he won the day by a vote of 111 to 25, a victory for America, Israel, and Jews. If Mr. Bolton did nothing else in his career, that would be enough to etch him into history. Yet he went on to other great things, including at the UN.

These columns cheered on his campaign for reform of the world body. It had emerged at odds with America, its leading funder; had grown top-heavy; was riddled with anti-Semitism, and had become contaminated with corruption. Yet his tenure there was cut short because the Democrats in the Senate refused to confirm him (he’d become, among other things, too pro-Israel for the Democratic caucus).

Mr. Bolton’s standing within the Trump administration, in our estimate (and it’s only that), was always tenuous. It’s not his fault, but the Congress isn’t there for policies as hawkish as he — and the Sun — would like. President Trump has won his mandates, including, to cite but one, to challenge whether more of what failed Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama is what we need as a strategy in Afghanistan.

Like Mr. Bolton, we are for the hard line in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, as well as Iran. Our erstwhile colleague, Eli Lake, has a column up saying that Mr. Bolton’s most important differences with the President were over Iran. Mr. Lake warns that Mr. Trump may now seek a compromise. Mr. Trump will want to be careful lest, absent Mr. Bolton, he gets trapped — and in an election year — with the same foreign policy as the Democrats.

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Correction: “Egregious government misconduct” was the phrasing with which lawyers for General Flynn characterized what they said was the failure of the government to make required disclosures to the defense. The phrase was reported inaccurately in the early edition of this editorial.