The Justice Department on Thursday secured an indictment against John Bolton for allegedly mishandling classified information, making President Trump ’s former national security adviser the latest of his prominent critics to face prosecution.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Bolton, 76 years old, shared with two relatives more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like” entries that contained classified information about his daily activities as national security adviser. He would send the entries electronically, sometimes from his private AOL and Google email accounts, prosecutors said. The documents don’t identify the recipients, but people familiar with the matter said they were Bolton’s wife and daughter.
The indictment indicates classified information may have been exposed when Iranian hackers got into Bolton’s personal email account and gained access to the material he had shared. A Bolton representative told the FBI his emails had been hacked in July 2021, but didn’t say that classified information was shared through the account.
Bolton described the charges as part of an effort to intimidate Trump critics. “I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power,” Bolton said in a statement.
The 18-count indictment in Maryland federal court is the latest to target one of Trump’s adversaries. The Justice Department recently launched prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey and New York’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James , after the president demanded them. At Trump’s urging, prosecutors have also opened probes of his other favored targets, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Christopher Wray , and he has promised more to come.
During a gathering with his top three law-enforcement officials at the White House on Wednesday, Trump pointed to other people he thought should be prosecuted, including Jack Smith , the former special counsel who indicted him twice.
The Bolton case has a more complicated back story. The probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation began well before Trump returned to the White House, and continued, with agents searching Bolton’s Maryland home and downtown D.C. office in August. FBI agents said in court filings that they found classified documents, including some that referenced weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. mission to the United Nations and records related to the U.S. government’s strategic communications.
While career prosecutors expressed concern that the Comey and James cases were weak, officials view the Bolton case as being on stronger footing, people familiar with the matter said.
The indictment charges Bolton with eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information.
“There is one tier of justice for all Americans,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable.”
A lawyer for Bolton, Abbe Lowell, said that the charges relate to portions of Bolton’s personal diaries, “records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021.”
“Like many public officials throughout history,” Lowell added, “Bolton kept diaries—that is not a crime.”
In what he described as diary entries, Bolton detailed information he learned in meetings with military officials, foreign leaders and members of the intelligence community, some of which prosecutors said had been classified at the highest levels.
The day before he took over as national security adviser, prosecutors said Bolton set up a group chat with the two relatives, telling them it was “For Diary in the future!!!”
In July 2018, he sent the group a 24-page document with a follow-up message saying, “None of which we talk about!!!,” according to court documents. He referred to the relatives as his editors, promised them more diary entries and talked about how the material would be used in his memoir. Bolton also unlawfully stored documents, writings and notes about national defense at his home in Maryland, prosecutors said.
The Justice Department during Trump’s first term sued Bolton and launched a criminal investigation into whether he unlawfully disclosed classified information in his memoir, which offered a scathing assessment of Trump’s presidency.
The lawsuit said that while an initial government review had judged the manuscript to be free of classified information, other senior officials later determined that it still contained some. The Justice Department escalated the fight months later, launching a criminal probe into Bolton’s handling of the information and issuing grand jury subpoenas to him and his literary agent.
The Justice Department during the Biden administration dropped the lawsuit and the grand jury probe in 2021, but later reopened the investigation, people familiar with the matter said.
Bolton clashed with Trump over multiple foreign-policy issues during his 18-month tenure in the president’s first term, and was ultimately dismissed . He has maintained a drumbeat of public criticism of Trump so far during the president’s second term.
Trump revoked Bolton’s security clearance on his first day back in the White House earlier this year, and has ended Bolton’s security detail, even after officials said he was the target of a murder-for-hire plot by a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Asked about the indictment on Thursday, Trump said of Bolton, “I just think he’s a bad person.”
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com
