A federal grand jury in Maryland on Oct. 16 returned an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton for mishandling classified national defense information obtained during his tenure in the first Trump administration. He became the third prominent critic, and perceived opponent, of President Donald Trump to be indicted in the last month.
Following his indictment, Bolton, whom Trump let go in September 2019 after 17 months as his national security adviser, said in a statement that he is the “latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those” Trump “deems to be his enemies.”
But some legal analysts have said that the government appears to have a strong case against Bolton – more so than it does against two other Trump rivals who were indicted by federal grand juries recently: former FBI Director James Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was charged with committing mortgage fraud.
Here, we’ll provide information about what’s in the indictment and Bolton’s response.
The Charges Against Bolton
The 26-page indictment alleges that Bolton “abused his position” as national security adviser “by sharing more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities,” including national defense and classified information, with two unauthorized individuals.
And after he was no longer permitted to do so, “Bolton also unlawfully retained documents, writings, and notes relating to the national defense, including information classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level, in his home in Montgomery County, Maryland,” the indictment says. SCI is an abbreviation for “sensitive compartmented information,” which only people with proper security clearances can access.
For the alleged conduct, Bolton faces 18 criminal charges, including 10 counts of unlawful retention of classified defense information and eight counts of transmitting it.
Although not named in the indictment, the people with whom he supposedly shared the classified material are reportedly his wife and daughter, who may have been helping Bolton with his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” about his time as Trump’s national security adviser. The indictment accuses Bolton of using personal, non-governmental email accounts and messaging applications to send his relatives “diary-like entries” that included top secret or sensitive details, which he was not allowed to do.
In addition, some entries with classified information “were printed and stored” at Bolton’s home, and digital copies of some entries “were also stored on personal electronic devices” belonging to Bolton and others at that residence, the indictment says. The FBI recovered some of those materials when conducting a court-ordered search of his home on Aug. 22.
Also, according to the indictment, Bolton’s personal email was hacked by someone “believed to be associated with” Iran who “gained unauthorized access to the classified and national defense information in that account.” While a representative for Bolton informed the FBI of the hack in July 2021, the indictment says his representative did not tell authorities that same email account had been used to transmit classified defense material.
Bolton’s Response
After he was charged, Bolton called his indictment political.
In a statement to reporters, he said, referring to Trump, “Now, I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts.”
Bolton noted that the FBI was previously made aware that his email account was hacked and that no charges were filed against him during the Biden administration. He also said that federal officials had reviewed in advance his 2020 memoir.
However, the indictment says that none of the classified material that is the basis for the charges against Bolton was featured in that book.
Trump had repeatedly claimed that there was classified information in Bolton’s book and that “he should go to jail for that for many, many years.” Trump’s Justice Department also sued Bolton in June 2020 to delay the book’s publication and collect any profits Bolton had received.
The DOJ under Trump later opened a criminal investigation into whether classified material had been published, but the investigation was dropped in June 2021, during Joe Biden’s presidency.
CNN reported that it was the email hack investigation that was initiated in 2022, also under Biden, that ultimately led to Bolton being indicted this year.
A team of career prosecutors at the Justice Department, led by Thomas Sullivan, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, presented the case against Bolton to the grand jury. That’s a key difference from the cases against Comey and James, in which the indictments were obtained by Lindsey Halligan, a former personal attorney for Trump whom Trump named interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after Erik Siebert was forced out of that position. Halligan, who had no prior experience as a prosecutor, obtained the Comey and James indictments in her first three weeks on the job.
“This indictment stands in stark contrast to the indictments against James Comey and Letitia James in its detailed recitation of the allegations and the serious nature of the charges,” Barbara McQuade, a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School, and a former U.S. attorney, told us in an email about the Bolton indictment. “The 26-page indictment quotes from email messages and Bolton’s ‘diary,’ which allegedly contain classified information. If these allegations are true, this is a serious breach of public trust.”
In an Oct. 20 Substack post, McQuade said that the charges against Bolton “appear to be based on strong evidence.”
Andrew Weissmann, a professor of practice at New York University Law School, and a former FBI lawyer, told NPR something similar about the Bolton case in an Oct. 17 interview.
“In many ways, it is unlike the Comey case and Letitia James case because it appears on the face of it to be stronger and more merited to bring,” he said. “And one indication of that is that career people signed this. So it is – we don’t have that unusual confluence of events that was true of the other two.”
But in his statement to the press, Bolton argued that his indictment is about Trump’s “intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct.” He said he would defend his “lawful conduct” in court and “expose” Trump’s “abuse of power.”
In his own statement to media, Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote that the charges against his client “stem from portions” of “personal diaries over his 45-year career – records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021.” Bolton “kept diaries – that is not a crime,” Lowell said.
But McQuade told us “it is a crime to transmit or mishandle classified information, in any form.”
Bolton pleaded not guilty to all 18 charges in an Oct. 17 court appearance.
The Trump, Bolton Beef
After departing the Trump White House six years ago, over differences about foreign policy, Bolton became one of Trump’s harshest critics – saying publicly, and in his book, that Trump was not fit for office. Trump punched back, calling Bolton “grossly incompetent,” “a liar” and a “wacko” who “was not liked.”
When a reporter asked Trump on Oct. 16 about Bolton’s indictment, Trump said he had not reviewed the case but called Bolton a “bad person.”
“Yeah, he’s a bad guy,” Trump said. “It’s too bad, but it’s the way it goes.” Then, in a Fox News interview that aired Oct. 19, Trump called Bolton’s indictment “a good thing.”
Trump himself was indicted in June 2023 for mishandling classified national defense documents after he left office. But a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the indictment in July 2024, based on the Trump legal team’s motion that Jack Smith, the special counsel who obtained the indictment against Trump, was unlawfully appointed without congressional approval.
After Trump won the election in November, Smith filed a motion to drop his appeal of the judge’s dismissal based on the legal interpretation that the Constitution does not allow a sitting president to be prosecuted.
If convicted, Bolton could get up to 10 years in prison for each criminal count.
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