WASHINGTON — John R. Bolton, the national security hawk and former adviser to President Donald Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on Thursday on charges of mishandling classified information.
An 18-count indictment accused Bolton of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of “diary” notes about his day-to-day activities as Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and 2019. Many of those notes included “national defense information,” including details classified as top secret, the indictment charged.
Trump and his former aide parted bitterly toward the end of his first term. “He’s a bad guy,” Trump said in answer to a question from a reporter at the White House about Bolton. “That’s the way it goes.”
While Bolton is part of a string of perceived enemies of the president to become prosecutorial targets, the federal investigation into him gained momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence agencies gathered what former officials have described as troubling evidence.
In recent weeks, Trump has removed or replaced prosecutors in order to secure indictments against two of his longtime targets: James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. The charges against Bolton, however, were sought and obtained by career prosecutors in the Justice Department.
Prosecutors said Bolton occasionally used his AOL email account or an electronic messaging application to send the notes to two unidentified people who did not have security clearances, according to the charges.
The 26-page indictment said that Bolton’s own descriptions of where he learned information often showed that he recognized that he was describing carefully guarded government secrets. One entry by Bolton began, “The intel briefer said,” and another read, “While in the Situation Room, I learned.”
Making matters worse, Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, the indictment said.
Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that the facts of the case “were investigated and resolved years ago.” Bolton, like many public officials, he added, “kept diaries — that is not a crime.” Those diaries, Lowell said, were unclassified records that were shared “only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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