How the Bolton Indictment Compares to Trump’s Classified Documents Case

Some charges against the onetime national security adviser resemble the dropped case against President Trump, but there are also differences.

The indictment on Thursday of John R. Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, over his handling of classified information invites comparison to Mr. Trump’s own indictment on similar charges.

Mr. Trump was accused of illegally holding onto classified documents after he left the White House in January 2021, and of obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them from his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. The case was dropped last year after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election.

Mr. Bolton is accused of illegally sending classified information to two close family members who did not have security clearances, and of illegally holding onto copies of those messages at his house in Maryland.

Here is a closer look at how the two cases compare.

Both were accused of handling data insecurely.

Both men were accused of not taking the proper precautions to secure classified information.

In Mr. Trump’s case, he was accused of storing boxes with classified information in various insecure locations at Mar-a-Lago, including a bathroom and a ballroom stage. Because Mar-a-Lago is a club and not just a residence, many people could have gained access to the documents before the F.B.I. finally retrieved them in August 2022.

In Mr. Bolton’s case, he was accused of transmitting the entries using personal email accounts and an encrypted consumer messaging app that were not approved for sending and storing classified information. One of the email accounts was apparently hacked by Iran in 2021, the indictment said. And while his house had an approved facility for storing classified information while he was Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, it did not have one afterward.

Both faced multiple counts of unauthorized retention.

The charges in the two indictments substantially overlap in one respect: Both men were charged with multiple counts of unauthorized retention of national defense information under Section 793(e) of Title 10 of the United States Code, part of a law known as the Espionage Act.

In both cases, prosecutors picked a subset of the files recovered from the men’s homes during court-authorized searches — presumably, documents that were sensitive enough to impress a jury, but not so sensitive that it would be risky to discuss them in court — and brought a count based on each. Mr. Trump was charged with 38 such counts, and Mr. Bolton with eight.

The indictments used their past statements against them.

The indictments against both men cited their own public statements criticizing others for mishandling classified information, to underscore that they knew what they were doing was wrong.

In Mr. Trump’s case, the indictment cited numerous statements he made during the 2016 presidential campaign about the need to vigorously enforce laws meant to protect classified information. At the time, Mr. Trump was using that issue to attack his rival, Hillary Clinton, for having used a private email server while secretary of state.

In Mr. Bolton’s case, the indictment quoted extensively from comments he made in the spring of 2025 criticizing Trump administration officials who had discussed plans for an upcoming military strike in Yemen on the consumer app Signal, in a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist. Notably, the Justice Department under Mr. Trump did not treat that incident as a crime.

Only Trump was charged with obstruction offenses.

The charges in the two cases significantly diverged in another respect. Each man was charged with a set of offenses that the other did not face.

In Mr. Trump’s case, his obstruction of efforts to retrieve files — including allegations that he caused a false statement to be made to law enforcement agents and conspired to conceal files from them — was a major part of his case. He faced eight additional charges that derived from that alleged behavior, which the indictment documented at length.

Mr. Bolton’s indictment chided him for not telling the F.B.I. that he still possessed classified information when he reported that an apparent Iranian hacker had broken into his email account in 2021. But it did not charge him with obstruction.

Only Bolton was charged with transmission offenses.

Mr. Bolton was, however, charged with eight counts of unauthorized transmission of national defense information under Section 793(d), based on the allegations that he emailed or used a messenger app program to send diary entries to his relatives, even though they were not cleared to see classified information in them.

The indictment of Mr. Trump recounted two incidents in which he was accused of showing classified files to people who were not authorized to receive them when he was no longer president, including a recorded interview at his club in Bedminster, N.J., with a writer and publisher of a forthcoming book, along with two staff members, during which he apparently showed them a classified military plan for attacking Iran.

But while the indictment charged Mr. Trump with the unauthorized retention of that document, it did not charge him with showing it to people who were not approved to see it.

Both got out of earlier trouble in part because of elections.

There is one other notable parallel. Both men evaded at least some legal troubles because of an election.

The criminal case against Mr. Trump over his handling of classified documents dissolved after he won the 2024 election. Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida had unexpectedly dismissed the case before trial in July 2024, ruling that the special counsel who brought the charges was improperly appointed.

Her ruling conflicted with decades of decisions by higher courts. The Justice Department asked an appeals court to overturn her decision and reinstate the charges. But before the court acted, Mr. Trump won the election. Because the department considers sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution, it dropped the case against Mr. Trump.

Four years earlier, in 2020, the Justice Department in the first Trump administration had opened a criminal and civil investigation into Mr. Bolton’s handling of classified information in connection with the publication of a memoir that criticized Mr. Trump. But in 2021, after the Biden administration took office, the department dropped that inquiry.

The New York Times has reported that the current inquiry traces back to the U.S. government’s gathering of data from an adversary’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.

Related Content