John Bolton inquiry eyes emails obtained by foreign government

WASHINGTON — The investigation into President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence officials collected information that appeared to show that he had mishandled classified information, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The United States gathered data from an adversarial country’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case that remains open.

The investigation of Bolton, who has become an ardent critic of the president, burst back into public view last week when federal agents searched his Maryland home and Washington office.

While those searches have raised fresh questions about the extent to which. Trump may be using the Justice Department and FBI to try to punish those he dislikes, the new details of the case present a more complex chain of events. The disclosures suggest that a long-running investigation into Bolton’s activities changed over time, with some of the issues echoing past inquiries into the handling of national security secrets.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

In a sign of the stakes for Bolton, he is in talks to retain high-profile criminal defense lawyer Abbe Lowell. Lowell, who has represented Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Biden’s son Hunter, is defending two other prominent perceived enemies of Trump who are now under scrutiny: New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board.

No charges have been filed against Bolton. One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.

Two federal judges authorized the warrants for the FBI to conduct the searches. To obtain the search warrants, prosecutors would have had to show that they had reason to believe that Bolton possessed evidence that showed he could have mishandled classified information.

Shortly before Bolton’s book was published, the Trump administration went to court seeking to delay its release. The Justice Department around that time also opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton had mishandled classified information by disclosing certain details in the book.

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