Former national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to mishandling classified information related to his work during the first Trump administration.
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Bolton, who served as White House national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and has since been a frequent critic of the president, appeared Friday morning for a re-arraignment in Greenbelt, Maryland, before Judge Theodore D. Chuang, an appointee of then-President Barack Obama.
Bolton pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information out of the 18 with which he was initially charged. He faces a prison sentence of up to 60 months and has agreed to pay $2.25 million, prosecutors said. He is set to be sentenced Oct. 28.
Abbe Lowell, Bolton’s attorney, said in a statement Friday that the former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador “did what real leaders do. He took responsibility for a mistake he made, thereby saving the government resources to pursue a case that could expose additional sensitive information.”
Trump on Friday night bashed Bolton in a Truth Social post, calling him “a terrible person, a lunatic who only wanted to start trouble and wars, and who was a needless pusher of death and destruction wherever he went.”
“Hopefully, he will be dealt with harshly!” Trump added.
Hayden O’Byrne, acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s national security division, said in a statement earlier Friday that the plea agreement “ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information. If you willfully mishandle these state secrets, the Department of Justice, led by the National Security Division, will investigate and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”
Bolton was originally indicted in October 2025, charged with eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information.
He pleaded not guilty to the charges and faced up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine per count, and three years of special release.
On Friday, Chuang reiterated the original counts in the case and asked if Bolton was only pleading guilty to count 12. “Yes, your honor,” Bolton said in court.
The Justice Department alleged that while he served as Trump’s national security adviser between April 2018 and September 2019, Bolton included “highly sensitive classified information” in documents that he described as diary entries. The documents contained information classified up to the Top Secret level.
Prosecutors said Bolton sent the documents to two family members via private email accounts and a messaging platform. In addition, they said a cyber actor associated with Iran hacked into Bolton’s personal email account after he left the White House in 2019 and when he reported it, he didn’t say that his account contained national defense information.
Last fall, Bolton was the third Trump critic to be indicted by the Justice Department, which also charged New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in separate cases on charges of mortgage fraud and lying to Congress, respectively. After a federal judge dismissed the charges against James, the DOJ twice failed to re-indict her. That initial case against Comey was also dismissed, but he was charged again in April with threatening Trump’s life by posting a photo of seashells on Instagram. Both James and Comey, who will go on trial in October, have denied wrongdoing.
