John Bolton Indicted On 18 Counts For Mishandling Classified Information
President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton was indicted Thursday on 18 charges related to his alleged leaking of national secrets while he wrote a book about his work in the White House.
The charges include eight counts of transmission of national defense information and ten counts of retention of national defense information.
Bolton was the national security advisor from April 9, 2018, through Sept. 10, 2019, during which time he had access to some of the nation’s most highly classified and sensitive national secrets.
To gain a Top Secret/SCI security clearance to access such information, Bolton had to sign numerous documents promising he would “never divulge classified information” without “prior written notice of authorization from” involved government agencies, and that he would “never divulge anything … that [he] kn[e]w to be [Sensitive Compartmented Information (‘SCI’)] to anyone who is not authorized to receive it without prior written authorization,” the indictment said.
In September of 2018, the federal government installed an SCI Facility (SCIF) in his Maryland home because he needed access to national defense information at any time. In October 2019, when his term was over, Bolton’s Home was decertified as an SCI facility. After that, he should not have had classified documents in his home.
According to the indictment, between April 9, 2019, and Aug. 22, 2025, “Bolton abused his position as National Security Adviser by sharing more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities as the National Security Advisor — including information relating to the national defense, which was classified up to the Top Secret/SCI level — with two unauthorized individuals. …”
The individuals mentioned in the indictment are not named but are described as being related to Bolton.
While Bolton held the position at the White House, the indictment said he sent “diary-like entries” describing his daily work to the two unnamed, related people, using a “commercial non-governmental messaging application.” Sometimes he sent top secret information using his AOL or Google account.
After Bolton left government service, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran hacked Bolton’s personal email account and gained unauthorized access to the classified and national defense information in that account,” the indictment reads. A Bolton representative told the government about the hack but did not reveal that the email account had classified information, according to the indictment.
In addition to writing a daily diary, the indictment indicates that Bolton may have called one of the people he sent the diary to talk about his activity instead of writing.
The day after Bolton’s tenure as national security advisor ended, a literary agent representing him sent an email to a book publisher pitching a book (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir) describing Bolton’s “impressions,” kept “in a meticulously observed manner with direct quotes from all parties based on contemporaneous notes,” the indictment reads.
The information in the top-secret documents Bolton is accused of transmitting includes the following: “Intelligence about future attack by an adversarial group in another country”; “intelligence that a foreign adversary was planning a missile launch in the future”; “sensitive sources and methods used to collect intelligence”; “covert action conducted by the U.S. Government, a liaison partner country, and specific information about the action.”
The documents Bolton allegedly kept contain the same sort of information and more, such as “adversary’s knowledge of planned U.S. actions; intelligence about adversary’s plans for attack conducted against U.S. Forces in another country … intelligence collected on the leader of an adversary nation’s military group,” and “covert action conducted by the U.S. Government in a foreign country.”
Notably, Bolton has criticized Trump severely on multiple occasions for his purportedly mishandling of classified documents.
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