Tasos Katopodis/Reuters via CNN Newsource
By Hannah Rabinowitz, Katelyn Polantz, Evan Perez, Dan Berman, Kristen Holmes, Kaitlan Collins, CNN
(CNN) — John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-adversary, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on Thursday.
Bolton, the third high-profile Trump political enemy to be indicted in less than a month, now faces eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information.
Essentially, prosecutors say, Bolton kept — and shared with family members — digital diaries of his activities that included all kinds of classified material from when he was national security adviser.
According to the indictment, Bolton shared “more than a thousand pages” of “diary-like entries” “that contained information classified up to the TOP SECRET” level.
The charges unveiled Thursday are the result of a criminal investigation that began in 2022 after Bolton’s emails were hacked by Iran.
Bolton is expected to surrender himself, as soon as Friday, to authorities at federal court in Greenbelt, but a hearing has not been scheduled.
What are the allegations?
Bolton would allegedly take handwritten notes from his day at the White House and other secure locations then rewrite them on his computer. Those entries, prosecutors say, were printed and remained on personal devices used by Bolton and others in his home.
“Bolton used his personal non-governmental email accounts, such as email accounts hosted by AOL and Google, to email information classified” to the individual’s personal email accounts, the indictment states.
“Often, Bolton’s notes described the secure setting or environment in which he learned the national defense and classified information that he was memorializing in his notes,” prosecutors say.
The purpose Bolton stated of creating a group chat in which he would later share his notes taken during his work as a national security adviser, the indictment says, was “For Diary in the future!!!”
“The FBI’s investigation revealed that John Bolton allegedly transmitted top secret information using personal online accounts and retained said documents in his house in direct violation of federal law,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement.
Prosecutors made use of Bolton’s voluminous media commentary on the sharing of classified information and use of encrypted chats to make the case that the former national security adviser has a strong “understanding of how to properly handle classified information and the potential consequences of failing to do so,” according to the indictment.
In one criticism of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time leading the State Department – cited by the indictment – Bolton said in 2017, a year prior to his service under Trump, “if I had done at the State Department what [senior U.S. Government official] did, I’d be [imprisoned] right now.”
Bolton says he’s a victim of Trump’s DOJ
Bolton issued a statement Thursday night saying he has become Trump’s latest target in the weaponization of his Justice Department.
He said that his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was reviewed and approved by “the appropriate, experienced career clearance officials” and that the FBI was made fully aware of his email hack in 2021. In the four years of the Biden administration, Bolton said, no charges were filed against him.
“Then came Trump 2 who embodies what Joseph Stalin’s head of secret police once said, ‘You show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,’” Bolton said.
“These charges are not just about his focus on me or my diaries, but his intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct,” he added. “Dissent and disagreement are foundational to America’s constitutional system, and vitally important to our freedom. I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power.”
Trump, meanwhile, was at the White House, doing a press event on IVF drug prices when the indictment was handed up.
“He’s, you know, a bad person. I think he’s a bad guy,” Trump said when told of the indictment. “Yeah, he’s a bad guy, too bad, but that’s the way it goes, right?”
Investigation began during Biden years
While the first Trump Justice Department had initially sought to block Bolton’s 2020 memoir and investigated whether Bolton violated the law by including information the administration said was classified, that case was closed in 2021.
It’s an Iran hack investigation started in 2021 under Biden that brought things to the current point.
For prosecutors and FBI investigators, part of their effort has focused on keeping the case out of the roiling politics looming over the Justice Department as Trump has publicly pushed for the prosecution of his political enemies, which includes Bolton.
Unlike prosecutions brought against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Bolton case has maintained the support of career prosecutors and investigators, people briefed on the matter said.
What’s next for Bolton?
The charges — if proven — are possibly more serious than those in other high-profile investigations into the mishandling of classified material, such as those related to Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, Joe Biden and Trump, said CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig.
That’s because Bolton is alleged to have “actively disseminated” classified information of the “highest level” to family members who had no security clearance. And when Bolton’s email was hacked by Iran, he allegedly omitted that he had been using the email account to share such information.
“If DOJ can prove this, this is big, big trouble for John Bolton,” Honig said.
The case has been assigned to US District Judge Theodore Chuang, appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama in 2014.
CNN’s Donald Judd and Devan Cole contributed to this report.
This story and headline have been updated with additional information.
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