President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton was charged Thursday by a federal grand jury in Maryland with transmitting and illegally storing classified information.
Bolton, 76, faces 18 counts – 10 for unlawful retention of national defense information and another eight for transmitting the information. Bolton, a Bethesda resident, was charged in U.S. District Court for Maryland, after the FBI raided his Montgomery County home and Washington office in August.
“Keeping Americans safe always has been, and always will be, the top priority for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland,” said U.S. Attorney for Maryland Kelly O. Hayes, who was appointed to the job this year. “If anyone endangers our national security, we’re committed to holding them accountable.”
The Bolton indictment is just the latest filed against a Trump enemy: Former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in his first term, was indicted in September on charges that he lied to Congress during its Trump-Russia probe, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office successfully brought fraud charges against the Trump Organization in 2022, was charged earlier this month with fraud for statements she made in a mortgage application to buy a second house in Norfolk, Virginia.
Both of those indictments were returned in the Eastern District of Virginia, where U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert resigned shortly before Comey’s indictment.
Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration in 2005 and 2006, and was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.
But Bolton, an important member of the Bush administration national security team that favored active military involvement in the Middle East, has since emerged as a chief Republican foreign policy critic of Trump. He wrote a 2020 book that blasted the president and widened the public rift between the two men.
The first Trump administration launched an investigation to determine if Bolton improperly used sensitive information in his book. The current search involves federal officials investigating Bolton’s actions over the last four years, according to the New York Times, which cited a federal law enforcement official.
Earlier this year, the president revoked the security detail for Bolton.
When informed of the indictment during an Oval Office event Thursday afternoon, Trump said he had not seen the indictment and was not even aware it had been returned. But he welcomed charges against Bolton, whom he called “a bad guy.”
“I didn’t know that, you’re telling me for the first time, but I think he’s a bad person,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question.
According to a statement from Hayes’ office, Bolton used his personal email and messaging apps to transmit send sensitive documents, some classified as high as Top Secret, that prosecutors said revealed intelligence about future attacks, foreign adversaries and foreign policy. The indictment alleges that Bolton illegally kept the documents at his home, according to the news release.
The 23-page indictment said that from April 2018 through August 2025, Bolton emailed more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like entries” detailing his day-to-day activities to two people he was related to. Those individuals did not have security clearances, but sensitive and classified materials were included in some of the emails, the indictment said.
It also said that in July 2021 Bolton reported to the FBI that a hacker, believed to have ties to Iran, had hacked his personal email. But he did not tell the FBI at the time that there may have been classified documents exposed in the hack, the document said.
The 18 charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison each, if convicted, Hayes office said.
“There is one tier of justice for all Americans,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement on Bolton’s indictment Thursday. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
– Jacob Fischer in States Newsroom’s D.C. bureau contributed to this report, which was updated to include Trump’s comments and details from the indictment.