Former United States National Security Adviser John Bolton has pleaded not guilty to federal charges over his handling of classified information.
On Friday, Bolton surrendered to authorities at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he also delivered his plea.
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He faces eight counts of transmitting national defence information and 10 counts of unlawfully retaining such information, each with the potential for 10 years in prison. If found guilty, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Bolton has served under four Republican presidents: He was an assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan, a diplomat under George HW Bush, an ambassador to the United Nations under George W Bush and a national security adviser for Donald Trump.
But it is his relationship with Trump that has raised concerns that his prosecution could be politically motivated.
Questions of retaliation
Bolton’s indictment is the third in a series of charges unveiled against prominent Trump critics since the president replaced the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia with one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan.
Since she was sworn in on September 22, Halligan has pursued criminal indictments against James Comey, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Letitia James, New York state’s attorney general.
In all three cases, Trump has a long and public history of acrimony with the defendants.
Comey, for example, led the FBI during its investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, a probe Trump considered a smear attempt. The president ultimately fired Comey early in his first term, in 2017.
James, meanwhile, successfully led a civil fraud case alleging that Trump and his associates at the Trump Organization inflated their assets to secure advantageous financing. In 2024, a court ordered Trump to pay $364m in damages, a sum that was later thrown out as “excessive”.
Trump named both James and Comey in a social media post explicitly calling on the Department of Justice to prosecute his political rivals last month.
“They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote in the post, directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The post proceeded to assert that Trump had fired the previous US attorney in Virginia for telling him they “had no case”.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he continued. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!) OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Bolton’s ties with Trump
Bolton, who was not named in the post, has nevertheless had his own long-running feud with the Republican leader.
Known for his hawkish foreign policy, advocating for aggressive US action in countries like Iran, Bolton served in Trump’s first administration for just more than a year, from 2018 to 2019. Bolton was the third national security adviser Trump had appointed in less than two years.
It is unclear whether Bolton was ultimately fired from his role, as Trump has claimed, or if he resigned, as Bolton himself maintains.
But Trump had clashed with Bolton over the latter’s hardline positions, a fact he has brought up in public comments.
“If I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now,” Trump wrote in a now-deleted post to Twitter, the platform currently known as X.
Bolton himself unloaded on Trump in a 2020 memoir of his time in the White House, called The Room Where It Happened. The book accused Trump of making policy decisions based on self-interest and showing a lack of awareness about global affairs. Bolton even suggested Trump had petitioned China to boost his re-election prospects.
“He couldn’t tell the difference between his personal interests and the country’s interests,” Bolton wrote at one point.
The former national security adviser also made appearances on news channels, serving as a critic of Trump and his policies.
Inside the indictment
When Trump returned to office for a second term in January, Bolton was among the first former officials to face backlash from the incoming administration.
On January 21, a day after his inauguration, Trump stripped Bolton of his security clearance, a decision Bolton criticised, given the assassination attempt he allegedly faced from Iranian forces.
“I am disappointed but not surprised,” Bolton wrote on social media.
“The Justice Department filed criminal charges against an Iranian Revolutionary Guard official in 2022 for attempting to hire a hit man to target me. That threat remains today.”
Then, in August, FBI officials raided Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, leaving with computer drives and several boxes of material.
The 26-page criminal indictment, released on Thursday, marks an escalation from that investigation.
Bolton, it says, “abused his position as National Security Advisor by sharing more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities as National Security Advisor – including information relating to the national defense which was classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level – with two unauthorized individuals”.
It also accuses Bolton of having “unlawfully retained documents, writings, and notes relating to national defense”.
Some of those writings, the indictment explains, were “diary-like entries” that were initially handwritten and later transcribed and sent to the two recipients electronically.
Those recipients have been reported in US media to be relatives, possibly Bolton’s wife and daughter.
The indictment adds that, after Bolton left office, he was targeted by a “cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic”. That, in turn, may have granted the hacker access to the classified materials Bolton had.
Critics have pointed out that Trump himself had been indicted in a classified documents case, with an investigation retrieving some 33 boxes and 11,000 records from the Republican leader’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Federal prosecutors had alleged that Trump attempted to conceal those documents in case that was dropped shortly before his second term. It is Justice Department policy not to prosecute a sitting president.
Since taking office, Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have likewise come under fire for sharing sensitive military information over the messaging app Signal – information that was accidentally shared with a journalist.
Bolton had criticised the Signal app leak publicly, appearing in US media to blast the Trump officials’ conduct. Those words were used in Thursday’s indictment as evidence that Bolton was aware of the security procedures necessary to handle sensitive information.
“I couldn’t find a way to express how stunned I was that anybody would do this,” Bolton is quoted as saying. “You simply don’t use commercial means of communication, whether it’s supposedly an encrypted app or not, for these kinds of discussions.”
Bolton has denied the charges against him and instead called the recent string of indictments an effort by Trump to “intimidate his opponents”.
“I have become the latest target in weaponising the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts,” Bolton said in a statement.
