John Bolton Indicted Over Handling of Classified Information

Mr. Bolton, a Trump aide turned critic, is part of a string of presidential foes to become prosecutorial targets. But his case gained momentum in the Biden administration.

John R. Bolton, the national security hawk and former adviser to President Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on Thursday on charges of mishandling classified information.

The indictment against Mr. Bolton was 18 counts and accused him of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of “diary” notes about his day-to-day activities as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and 2019. The notes, which were sent to two family members who did not have security clearances, included national defense information, such as details classified as top secret, according to the indictment.

President Trump and his former aide parted bitterly toward the end of his first term, and the president greeted the news with grim satisfaction. “He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question from a reporter at the White House about Mr. Bolton. “That’s the way it goes.”

While Mr. Bolton is part of a string of perceived enemies of the president to become prosecutorial targets, the federal investigation into him gained momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence agencies gathered what former officials have described as troubling evidence.

The prosecution appeared to follow normal department channels, without firings or forced transfers. Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, was among the career prosecutors to sign off on the charges in conjunction with the Justice Department’s national security division.

By contrast, Mr. Trump in recent weeks has removed or sidelined prosecutors in order to secure indictments against two of his longtime targets: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.

If convicted of the charges, Mr. Bolton, 76, could spend the rest of his life in prison. Each count carries a maximum potential sentence of 10 years.

Mr. Bolton is expected to surrender to the authorities on Friday and make his initial court appearance in Greenbelt, Md., later that day.

Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the charges against Mr. Bolton. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”

Mr. Bolton, in a statement, declared that the indictment was part of an intimidation campaign against critics of Mr. Trump. “I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power,” he said.

The two family members who received Mr. Bolton’s notes were not identified in the 26-page indictment, but prosecutors said Mr. Bolton occasionally used his AOL and Google email accounts to send notes to them.

Mr. Bolton’s written descriptions of where he learned information often indicated that he recognized that he was describing carefully guarded government secrets, the indictment added. One entry by Mr. Bolton began, “The intel briefer said,” while another read, “while in the Situation Room, I learned.”

Making matters worse, Mr. Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, the indictment said.

“A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021, but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser,” according to the filing.

One surreal section of the indictment described Mr. Bolton apparently being taunted by his hacker. A message on July 25, 2021, warned, “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email (some of which have been attached).” The email went on to declare, “This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late.” A representative for Mr. Bolton forwarded the email to the F.B.I.

The indictment laid out exchanges between Mr. Bolton and the two family members that made it clear he was meticulously assembling a record with their help, with the intent of turning it into a book. All three knew they needed to be discreet.

A day after Mr. Bolton joined the White House in April 2018, the indictment said, they started using an encrypted messaging app. “Why are we using this now? The encryption?” one of Mr. Bolton’s correspondents asked. “Yup,” the other responded. Mr. Bolton then chimed in: “For Diary in the future!!!!”

The charging document laid out a number of 20- to 50-page documents that Mr. Bolton sent to the two people over the app. After sending one 24-page document about his time as the national security adviser, Mr. Bolton followed up with a message that read, “None of which we talked about!!!” One of the recipients wrote back: “Shhhhh.”

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that the facts of the case “were investigated and resolved years ago.” Mr. Bolton, like many public officials, “kept diaries — that is not a crime,” Mr. Lowell added. Those diaries, Mr. Lowell said, were unclassified records that were shared “only with his immediate family, and known to the F.B.I. as far back as 2021.”

In August, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Bolton’s Maryland home and his office in Washington, carrying out boxes of papers, computer files and other materials as part of the investigation. Subsequent court filings indicated that some documents with low-level classification markings were found. Thursday’s filing said that printed versions of Mr. Bolton’s diary entries, which contained classified information, were found in the search of his home.

The New York Times has previously reported that the United States gathered data from an adversary’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case.

Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” which offered a highly critical behind-the-scenes look at the Trump administration.

None of the classified information described in the indictment was mentioned in the book, according to the filing, which said that Mr. Bolton shared intelligence about a foreign adversary’s plan for a future missile launch, a covert action in a foreign country and sensitive sources and methods used to collect intelligence.

Mr. Bolton has been a prolific television pundit for more than a decade, and Thursday’s indictment used some of his own statements against him, including his declaration that if he had done what Hillary Clinton did in using a private email server as secretary of state, “I’d be in jail right now.”

Prosecutors also cited his criticism of the Trump administration earlier this year when it was disclosed that officials had used Signal, a commercial messaging app, to discuss an upcoming military strike in Yemen.

“I couldn’t find a way to express how stunned I was that anybody would do this,” he said in April. “You simply don’t use commercial means of communication, whether it’s supposedly an encrypted app or not, for these kinds of discussions.”

While the Bolton case has taken a number of unexpected turns over the years, it stretches back to the waning days of the first Trump administration, when White House officials were furious that Mr. Bolton had written the book.

Shortly before Mr. Bolton’s memoir was published, the administration went to court seeking to delay its release. The Justice Department around that time also opened a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Bolton had mishandled classified information by disclosing certain details in the book. A judge later concluded that he might have published classified information, but the criminal investigation appeared to languish until the intelligence about his emails was gathered years later.

A 2021 settlement of the litigation over the book included the condition that Mr. Bolton return to the government any material in his possession “that may contain classified information,” the indictment said.

Earlier this year, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information.

Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.

Mr. Bolton was investigated under the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has in recent years taken on an outsize role in American politics as investigators have pursued similar cases against high-profile officials or candidates.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton was investigated for her use of a private email server to handle her work as secretary of state.

In 2022, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and found more than 100 classified documents, in addition to others retrieved earlier. Mr. Trump was indicted in that case, but the charges were dismissed by a trial judge during the 2024 presidential campaign.

And in early 2023, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to investigate how classified documents had ended up in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s office and home after he left the vice presidency.

James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.

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