US President Donald Trump’s first-term national security adviser, John Bolton, who later became a harsh critic of the Republican leader, was charged on Thursday with keeping top-secret documents at home and sharing diary-style notes about his time in government with family members that included classified material.
The 18-count indictment also suggests classified information was exposed when operatives believed to be linked to the Iranian regime hacked Bolton’s email account and gained access to sensitive material he had shared.
A well-known figure in Republican foreign policy circles who served for more than a year in Trump’s first administration before being fired in 2019 and writing a damning book about the president, the indictment sets the stage for a widely followed court case. The defendant became known for his hawkish views on US power.
What is Bolton accused of?
The indictment, filed in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, alleges that between 2018 and this past August, Bolton shared with two relatives more than 1,000 pages of information about his day-to-day activities in government.
The material included “diary-like” entries with information classified as high as top secret that he had learned from meetings with other U.S. government officials, from intelligence briefings or talks with foreign leaders, according to the indictment. After sending one document, Bolton wrote in a message to his relatives, “None of which we talk about!!!” In response, one of his relatives wrote, “Shhhhh,” prosecutors said.
The indictment says that among the material shared was information about foreign adversaries that, in some cases, revealed details about sources and methods used by the government to collect intelligence. One document related to a foreign adversary’s plans for a missile launch, while another detailed U.S. government plans for covert action and included intelligence blaming an adversary for an attack, court papers say.
In 2021, a Bolton representative told the FBI that his emails had been hacked, prosecutors say, but did not reveal he had shared classified information through the account or that the hackers now had possession of government secrets.
Bolton’s charge, a case against Trump adversary?
The case, the third against a Trump adversary in the last month, will also unfold against the backdrop of concerns that the Justice Department is pursuing the president’s political enemies while at the same time sparing his allies from scrutiny.
Bolton foreshadowed that argument in a defiant statement Thursday in which he denied the charges and called them part of an “intensive effort” by Trump to “intimidate his opponents.”
“Now, 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,” he said.
Even so, the indictment is significantly more detailed in its allegations than earlier cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Unlike the other two cases filed over the last month by a hastily appointed US attorney, this one was signed by career national security prosecutors.
And though the investigation burst into public view in August when the FBI searched Bolton’s home in Maryland and his office in Washington, the inquiry was already well underway by the time Trump took office a second time this past January.