The justice department filed federal charges against John Bolton, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump who turned into one of his biggest critics, accusing him of transmitting and retaining highly classified information under the Espionage Act.
The 18-count indictment was handed up by a grand jury in federal district court in Maryland on Thursday. Bolton has been charged with sending diary entries to two unnamed individuals about his day-to-day activities when he was national security adviser, many of which contained highly classified information.
In response to a question about the charges, Trump told reporters on Thursday that he was not aware of them but that Bolton was a “bad guy”.
While Bolton parted on sour terms from the White House, the criminal investigation gained momentum during the Biden administration over disclosures that troubled the US intelligence community.
The justice department pursues Espionage Act cases in the event of so-called “aggregating factors”: willful mishandling of classified information, vast quantities of classified information to support an inference of misconduct, disloyalty to the US and obstruction.
“BOLTON took detailed notes documenting his day-to-day meetings, activities, and briefings. Frequently, BOLTON handwrote these notes on yellow notepads throughout his day at the White House complex or in other secure locations, and then later re-wrote his notes in a word processing document,” the indictment said.
“The notes that BOLTON sent to Individuals 1 and 2 using his non-governmental personal email accounts and messaging account described in detail BOLTON’s daily activities as the National Security Advisor. 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.”
In a statement, Bolton’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said his client had not engaged in wrongdoing.
“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,” Lowell said. “Like many public officials throughout history, Ambassador Bolton kept diaries – that is not a crime.”
The indictment said Bolton used personal email accounts and a group chat that existed during and after his time as national security adviser to share notes and diary entries that contained classified information to two people who did not have security clearances.
“On or about September 24, 2019, fourteen days after he was no longer employed as the National Security Advisor, BOLTON left the messaging chat group with Individuals 1 and 2 that he had used to send them more than a thousand pages of notes memorializing his time as National Security Advisor,” the indictment said.
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In August, FBI agents searched Bolton’s home in Maryland and his office in Washington. They retrieved boxes of papers, computer files and other materials. Court filings related to the case later showed some of those materials with low-level classification markings.
The emails and notes were sent by Bolton in order to produce a compendium of his time as national security adviser for his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which angered Trump officials because of his critical behind-the-scenes look into the administration.
Shortly before the book was published, the administration sued to delay its release citing a classification review. The justice department also opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton mishandled classified information by disclosing certain details in the book.
The Biden justice department initially dropped the lawsuit and grand jury investigation in 2021. They later reopened the investigation as the US intelligence community learned more about Bolton’s emails through a foreign spy service, according to people familiar with the matter.
Earlier this year, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, conferred with Kash Patel, the FBI director, about the Bolton’s emails and how they appeared to have been transcriptions of classified material. The briefing appeared to spur renewed interest in investigating Bolton, the people said.