Trump's DOJ Indicts John Bolton for Leaking Classified Information
The former Trump administration official is facing a maximum of 180 years in prison.
President Donald Trump really doesn't like former National Security Adviser John Bolton. At the beginning of his administration, Trump signed an executive order specifically banning Bolton from receiving a security clearance because of the "grave risk" Bolton posed to national security. And on Thursday, the president celebrated as the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted Bolton under the Espionage Act.
"He's, you know, a bad person. I think he's a bad guy," Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. "Yeah, he's a bad guy, too bad, but that's the way it goes, right?"
The indictment accuses Bolton of sending "diary-like entries" containing top secret material to two unnamed individuals, one of whom is a relative of Bolton, via a private message app and personal email accounts. With eight counts of transmission of national defense information and ten counts of unlawful retention of national defense information, Bolton faces a maximum sentence of 180 years in prison.
The indictment also claims that a "cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran" hacked into Bolton's email account, which contained the top secret messages. Alleged Iranian operatives have pulled off several high-profile email breaches over the past few months, including the leak of Vice President J.D. Vance's opposition research dossier and an email trove containing many of Jeffrey Epstein's communications.
"I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose [Trump's] abuse of power," Bolton said in a statement to the media, before surrendering himself on Friday morning to a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In a press release, FBI Director Kash Patel denied that the indictment was political retaliation. "The case was based on meticulous work from dedicated career professionals at the FBI who followed the facts without fear or favor. Weaponization of justice will not be tolerated, and this FBI will stop at nothing to bring to justice anyone who threatens our national security," he said.
Bolton was the face of the first Trump administration's foreign policy until September 2019, when the ultra-hawkish consigliere had a dramatic falling out with the president. Foreign leaders would "give me everything I wanted because the guy's a nut job," Trump later said of Bolton, but Bolton's hardline stances "set [the administration] back very badly" during sensitive diplomacy with North Korea.
What really angered Trump was Bolton's decision to write a salacious tell-all memoir, The Room Where It Happened, about his time in the Trump administration—and to publish it against the White House's objections. The DOJ sued to stop the publication and opened a criminal investigation into Bolton's handling of classified information, then dropped both the civil and criminal cases in 2021, after President Joe Biden took office.
Trump's 2025 executive order specifically pointed to Bolton's book as evidence of his danger to national security. The order accused Bolton of "reckless treatment of sensitive information" for "monetary gain."
Several sources told CNN that the current indictment came out of a years-long investigation into Bolton's email account that is separate from the investigation into his book. According to the indictment, Bolton's office informed the government about the alleged Iranian hack in July 2021 without mentioning the classified information in his emails.
One irony of the case is that Trump himself was charged with mishandling classified information in 2023 after he took home boxes of White House documents. That case was dismissed in 2024, after he won the presidential election. On Wednesday, he publicly called for the prosecution of Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the 2023 charges against Trump.
Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who specializes in tough cases involving classified information, called the indictment of Bolton "far, far weaker (and more customary of conduct by senior govt officials) than allegations against President Trump in stealing & storing marked classified documents at Mar-a-Lago."
Another irony is that, despite their personal falling out, Bolton has politically gotten everything he wanted. Within its first year, the second Trump administration has bombed Iran and authorized a regime change campaign in Venezuela, two of Bolton's obsessions during the first Trump administration. In fact, much of Bolton's frustration towards Trump came from his feeling that Trump wasn't serious enough about these projects.
"The President vacillated and wobbled, exacerbating internal Administration disagreements rather than resolving them, and repeatedly impeding our efforts to carry out a policy," Bolton wrote in The Room Where It Happened. (Wobbled, you say?) Bolton complained about Trump's "indecision" on Venezuela and "irrational" order to cancel a planned attack on Iran.
Now that Trump is back in the White House, his administration seems much more determined to carry out his will—whether that's attacking countries Bolton doesn't like or jailing Bolton himself.