Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who served President Donald Trump during his first term and later became a vocal critic, faces 18 criminal counts on charges of keeping classified documents at home and sharing sensitive information from his government work with family members.
The 18-count indictment also said Iranian-linked hackers breached his email in 2021 and gained access to the material he had shared. A representative for Bolton alerted the FBI that his emails had been hacked, prosecutors said, but did not disclose that classified information was in the emails.
Bolton had served for more than a year in Trump’s administration before being fired in 2019 and emerging as a harsh critic of the president.
‘Latest target’
Bolton in argument in a defiant statement on 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,” Bolton said.
“The underlying facts in this case were investigated and resolved years ago. These charges stem from portions of Ambassador Bolton’s personal diaries over his 45-year career — records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021,” Bolton’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a separate statement. “Like many public officials throughout history, Ambassador Bolton kept diaries — that is not a crime. We look forward to proving once again that Ambassador Bolton did not unlawfully share or store any information.”
Background
The case was filed in Maryland by a career prosecutor, separate from the recent Virginia cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom deny their charges.
The indictment in the Bolton case is more detailed than the Comey or James cases. It alleges, for instance, that Bolton shared more than 1,000 pages of information about day-to-day activities with two unnamed family members and stored and shared sensitive 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 US government plans for covert action and included intelligence blaming an adversary for an attack, court papers said.
“There is one tier of justice for all Americans,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardises our national security will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
Bolton previously faced scrutiny over his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which portrayed Trump’s foreign policy conduct. The Trump administration asserted that Bolton’s manuscript included classified information that could harm national security if exposed.
Bolton’s lawyers have said he moved forward with the book after a White House National Security Council official, with whom Bolton had worked for months, said the manuscript no longer contained classified information.
Lowell has said that many of the documents seized in August had been approved as part of a pre-publication review for Bolton’s book. He said many were decades old, from Bolton’s long career in the State Department, as an assistant attorney general, and as the US ambassador to the United Nations.
Bolton, a veteran Republican official, served in senior national security roles under Reagan, George W Bush, and Trump before leaving the Trump administration in 2019 after disputes over Iran, North Korea,andUkraine.
